From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-08T00:35:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular expressions alternative

On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, 2:26:53 AM, Maur�cio wrote:

>    I think I'm only standardizing. a matches a, so, $ matches $.
> If you want something special, preceed it with a backslash. I
> think that should have been done in the first place.

Most things are done for a reason, and this is no exception.  Regex in
Vim is done mostly the way you're talking about, and it is frustrating
getting lost in a sea of backslashes all the time.

>    I want to be able to create a regular expression without
> knowing by heart all existing special characters. I would
> like, for instance, to write a regexp that matches
> 100% (or any number like \d\d%) without knowing if % is
> a special character or not. Even the existing function
> Regexp.escape doesn't help with that.

irb can help, though :)

  irb(main):001:0> "89%" =~ /(\d+)%/
  => 0
  irb(main):002:0> $1
  => "89"

Gavin