[pcre-dev] [Bug 891] Support [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] patterns

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Author: Sheri
Date:  
To: pcre-dev
Subject: [pcre-dev] [Bug 891] Support [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] patterns
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http://bugs.exim.org/show_bug.cgi?id=891




--- Comment #3 from Sheri <silvermoonwoman@???> 2009-09-23 20:32:41 ---
Alan Lehotsky wrote:
>
> >From http://arglist.com/regex/regex7.html, purporting to be the man pages
> for Spencer's BSD 4.4 regex.
>
>
> There are two special cases+ of bracket expressions: the bracket
> expressions `[[:<:]]' and `[[:>:]]' match the null string at the beginning
> and end of a word respectively. A word is defined as a sequence of word
> characters which is neither preceded nor followed by word characters. A
> word character is an alnum character (as defined by ctype(3)) or an
> underscore. This is an extension, compatible with but not specified by
> POSIX 1003.2, and should be used with caution in software intended to be
> portable to other systems.
>

LOL. The last line of the cited reference (under "Bugs") says, "The
syntax for word boundaries is incredibly ugly."

Regards,
Sheri


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