Re: [pcre-dev] bug#60690: [PATCH v2] grep: correctly identif…

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Author: Paul Eggert
Date:  
To: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
CC: Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón, demerphq, pcre-dev, 60690, gitster, git
Subject: Re: [pcre-dev] bug#60690: [PATCH v2] grep: correctly identify utf-8 characters with \{b, w} in -P
On 1/9/23 11:51, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

>     /b:
>     155781
>     (*UCP)/b:
>     46035
>     /s:
>     0
>     (*UCP)/s:
>     0
>     /w:
>     142468
>     (*UCP)/w:
>     9706

>
> So the output still differs, and some of those differences may or may
> not be wanted.


I took a look at the output, and by and large I'd want the differences;
that is, I'd want the UCP version, which generates less output. This is
because several Emacs source files are not UTF-8, and \b has nonsense
matches when searching text files encoded via Shift-JIS or Big 5 or
whatever. For this sort of thing, the fewer matches the better.


> If all you're doing is matching either ASCII or Japanese text and you
> want "locale-aware numbers" it might do the wrong thing.


I'm not seeing much of a problem here. When searching Japanese text, I
would expect \d and [0-90-9] (using both ASCII and full-width digits) to
be equivalent so (assuming UCP) it's not a big deal as to which regex
you use, since Japanese text won't contain Bengali (or whatever) digits.
And when searching binary data, I'd expect a bunch of garbage no matter
how \d is interpreted.

Here I'm assuming [0-9] (using full-width digits) has the expected
meaning in PCRE2, i.e., that PCRE2 didn't make the same mistake that
POSIX made.