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Postings from January 2013
From commit 9d1a5160ac870eccea399973eaa9f9e3020b0833
Author: Karl Williamson <public@khwilliamson.com>
Date: Thu Jan 10 17:06:04 2013 -0700
New regex experimental feature: (?[ ])
This is a fancier [bracketed] character class which allows set
operations, such as intersection and subtraction. The entry in perlre
for this commit details its operation.
Besides extending regular expressions to handle this functionality,
recommended by Unicode, the intent here is to do three things:
1) Intersection has been simulated by regexes using zero-width
look-around assertions, which are non-obvious. This allows
replacing
those with a more powerful and clearer syntax; the compiled regexes
are smaller and faster. Everything is known at compile time.
2) Set operations have also been simulated by using user-defined
Unicode
properties. These are globals, have security implications,
restricted names, and d don't allow as complex expressions as this
new feature.
3) I hope that this feature will come to be viewed as a "better"
bracketed character class. I took advantage of the fact that there
is no embedded base to have to be compatibile with to forbid
certain
iffy practices with the existing ones, while remaining mostly
backwards compatible. The main difference is that /x is always
enabled, so white space can be pretty much freely used with these,
but to specify a match on white space, it must be escaped. Things
that should have been illegal are, such as \x{}, and \x{abcdefghi}.
Things that look like a posix specifier but don't quite meet the
rules now give an error instead of silently compiling. e.g.,
[:digit]
is an error instead of the union of the characters that compose it.
I may have omitted things; perhaps it should be an error to
have the
same letter occur twice, adjacent. Since this is experimental, we
can make such changes based on field feed back.
The intent is to keep this feature, since it is strongly
recommended by
Unicode. The exact syntax is subject to change, so is experimental.
========================
Yves had a somewhat different internal syntax proposed. I did what I
originally thought for several reasons, but we can discuss changes.
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