At 7:23 PM +0900 9/8/11, Philip Spaelti wrote:
>I am not sure what you are begging for.
>
>On 9. Aug 2011, at 18:55 , Alan Dow wrote:
>
>>  At 11:59 AM +0900 9/8/11, Philip Spaelti wrote:
>>>  On 9. Aug 2011, at 11:01 , Robert B. Waltz wrote:
>>>
>>>>  I'll tell you why it's a mess: ANY character 
>>>>preceded by \ should be treated as a literal, 
>>>>simply for consistency. I'm pretty sure this 
>>>>does not work, because of the odd results 
>>>>I've been getting. Unfortunately, I haven't 
>>>>yet identified the exact command causing my 
>>>>problems, but it appears that, somehow, a \t 
>>>>is being treated as a literal t!
>>>
>>>  With all due respect what you are saying here 
>>>is inconsistent. You want \[char] to be 
>>>treated as a literal and then you complain 
>>>when "\t" is treated as a literal "t" ;-)
>>>
>  >> Of course "\" is the escape character which 
>means that characters following it are usually 
>treated in a non-literal way. Only special 
>characters should (must) be treated literally 
>after a backslash. NWP does indeed do this 
>correctly, to my knowledge. And "\t" should of 
>course be a tab, which it is. (And enclosing it 
>in double quotes, should just cause 
>interpolation, i.e., turn it into an actual tab, 
>so this shouldn't cause a problem.)
>>
>>  Beg to differ: Nearly all regex engines use a 
>>plain dot to mean 'any char except line break', 
>>and slash-dot to mean a literal full stop (or 
>>if you like, period).
>
>Which is exactly what NWP does too.
>
>>  If Nisus have done this deliberately (which I 
>>doubt), they are seriously out of step with 
>>convention.
>>  See here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/refflavors.html
>>
>>  The idea of an escape sequence is 
>>implementation-specific. The idea is to escape 
>>the usual meaning of a char 
>>_within_your_program_environment_.
>  > That can mean a usually literal char (such as 
>t, b, n, r, s, ...) acquires a special meaning 
>when escaped. And if your program usually 
>applies a special meaning to a char (such as, 
>maybe, <return>, '[', '\', '?' and '.' ) 
>escaping it will return the literal meaning.
>  > Consistent this has never been (nor could it be).
>>
>
>I am not sure who this little lecture is 
>intended for. I think if you re-read what I 
>wrote, you will see that I already said all that.
>
>
>Philip Spaelti
>[log in to unmask]

Ooops, yes I see now you are quite correct,

I found following relevant passage in User Manual:

**********
It is important to remember, especially for 
PowerFind Pro expressions, that string literals 
undergo interpolation (see Literals) before being 
used by the find commands. For example, the 
following commands are not the same:
Find '\s+', 'E'
Find "\s+", 'E'
The first finds one or more whitespace 
characters, as you might expect. The second 
however searches for one or more of the letter 
Œs¹ because the backslash is first interpreted 
using the rules for string literals. If 
double-quotes are to be used the backslash must 
be escaped like so:
Find "\\s+", 'E'
Because of this it is recommended that you use 
single-quotes for find command arguments.

**********

However, I do stand by my comment on escape 
sequences, which meant to say "looking for 
consistency is a waste of time". Sorry if it came 
across as a 'lecture'.

foot still in mouth... AD