From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-11-18T23:39:47+09:00
Subject: Re: About Regular Expressions


On Nov 18, 2004, at 5:34 AM, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

> Lately there have been a bunch of posts on this list about regular
> expressions in Ruby and people seem to cry wolf whenever they don't get
> them quite right.  By crying wolf here I mean that they suspect a bug.
> That's most often the same as blaming core-dumps on the operating
> system.  It's time that people try to reason about what they've 
> actually
> written and look at the documentation (which may be too limited?) 
> before
> complaining here.
>
> I am not suggesting that these question stop entirely, but I request
> that they be well thought out before.  Still, there seems to be a need
> for a FAQ or similar, covering regular expression basics and common
> pitfalls - perhaps even including common idioms and uses in Ruby.
>

I don't think there needs to be a FAQ or anything like that as much as 
there needs to be a single site that's a good repository of pointers to 
information. When I have a question about Ruby, I'll check the ML 
archives through Google, or ruby-doc if it seems like the sort of thing 
likely to be in the RDoc.

I was probably the last person to "cry wolf", so to speak, but seeing 
as my problem was a Regexp problem, I didn't have much hope with 
Google, because doing text searches for regexp characters doesn't work 
often, nor with RDoc, because RDoc is too granular to have that sort of 
information.

Personally I don't need a regexp FAQ or tutorial, I need a 
bits-and-pieces reference, and I would've found that either in:

1. An online reference page like 
http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html (thanks for the 
pointer, Brian!)

2. The Pickaxe v2, either on p. 71 or on p. 325.

Obviously, it didn't occur to me to look in either place this last time 
around; I'll try to remember that for next time. But if we want people 
to do more looking on their own, I think it needs to be easier to do 
that. I have some guesses as to what could change, but I personally 
don't have any time to do anything about it so I'm not inclined to 
complain about it.

F.