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Postings from September 2010
I've been thinking about the oft-expressed issue here concerning e.g.,
making \d match only 0-9, and now have a concrete proposal.
I'm proposing a '/a' regex modifier that would restrict matches of \d,
\s, \w, and [:posix:] to characters in the ASCII character set. This
would be true even on utf8-encoded patterns and targets.
I'm leaning against having this affect case insensitive matching, thus
'"\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S}" =~ /s/ai' would still be true.
The modifier would be added automatically when a regex is compiled in
the scope of something like 'use re "ascii"'. It could also be
explicitly stated in a (?a...) construct. It could not be expressed as
a /suffix in 5.14, unless Jesse changes his mind.
There are 3 features I think that this could interact with, i.e., what
happens if a regex is compiled in the scope of any combination of:
use re 'ascii'
use bytes
use locale
use feature 'unicode_strings'
1) bytes. I don't think that there is any conflict, as all ascii chars
are single bytes anyway.
2) locale. I believe locale should have precedence.
3) unicode_strings. I believe ascii should have precedence.
If you have an inquiring mind, the current implementation is that bytes
has highest precedence, followed by locale, then unicode_strings. I
propose to insert ascii between locale and unicode_strings in the
pecking order.
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