From: Dmitrii Dimandt <dmitriid@...>
Date: 2006-06-26T16:37:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/26/06, Daniel DeLorme <dan-ml@dan42.com> wrote:
> Logan Capaldo wrote:
> >
> > Regular expressions are a very powerful tool, but they do not describe
> > the entire set of operations one would reasonably want to perform on a
> > string. Or perhaps they do but in a needlessly complex way. I want to
> > get the first letter (character?) of a sentence, in pure regexp terms
> > I'd do this: str.match(/\A./)[0] It's needlessly cryptic. Note that I'm
> > not trying to make a commentary on whether or not character string/byte
> > string should be separate, just trying to point out that "use regular
> > expressions" shouldn't always be the answer.
>
> It's funny, maybe I'm just dumb but I can't think of a single *real-world*
> example where you'd want to access particular characters of a string. Why do you
> want the first char? In the context of a byte string there might be something
> special at position n (e.g. exif header), but in the context of a human-readable
> string what is there? For example, if you want that first char in order to check
> if it's a space or not, you should use str =~ /^ /, etc, etc. I honestly can't
> think of any real-world examples where regular expressions are less appropriate
> than pointer arithmetic. Can you illuminate me with some?

Substrings? Finding occurence of a string in a nother string? Why
shouldn't str[0..3] work on characters (for a string with encoding
set)? Maybe I want to do something like str[0] =
Unicode::upcase(str[0])? :)

Isn't that what Humane Interface Design
(http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/HumaneInterface.html) is all about
;-)

Regular expressions _are_ cryptic. They are powerful, but do I need a
sledgehammer when I need a paperclip?