Re: `nnmail-split-fancy' regexp

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br>]

On Jun 28, 1999, Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> wrote:

> amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko) writes:
>> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

>> > Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

>> > > How about using ".*" as the magic prefix instead?

>> > Sounds like a good idea.

>> Uhm, no.  As Alexandre Oliva observed a couple of days ago in

> And how is this relevant for what the magic prefix should be?

Ah, now I get it.  You're not suggesting that the feature is
unnecessary, you're just suggesting a different magic prefix.

Just a nit: in the case of \& substitutions, it isn't clear whether
the .* prefix is included in the match.  With the `[partial]'
implementation, it is not, which sounds reasonable, and probably
matches the users' expectations.  With `.*', it would not be
immediately clear whether `.*' is just a magic prefix or if it's
actually part of the regex.  Moreover, it would match everything up to 
the begining of the line, including the field name, which would break
the multi-match mechanism introduced in my last patch.  Let me try to
clarify.  Given a header line such as:

To: foo, bar

If we have rules for cross-posting that match both `foo' and `bar',
say `.*\(foo\|bar\)', `foo' will not be matched if `.*' is considered
part of the regexp, because the next backward-search would start just
before the previous match, i.e., just before the `To'.

So, even though `.*' appears to be much more intuitive, it is not
really that intuitive if you don't happen to know what's going on
behind the scenes, so I'd rather have a prefix that is clearly not
part of the regexp.  It might have been better to use a (cons 'partial
"regex") to denote partial matches...

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
{oliva,Alexandre.Oliva}@dcc.unicamp.br  aoliva@{acm.org,computer.org}
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
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