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From: goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: checking strings for regex metachars
Summary: anyone have a procedure to do this ^ around?
Message-ID: <8113@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 90 16:58:52 GMT
Sender: news@tank.uchicago.edu
Reply-To: goer@sophist.UUCP (Richard Goerwitz)
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 14

Call it laziness, or call it what you want.  Does anyone have
a function lying around that determines whether a given string
contains metacharacters (i.e. which takes into account escapes
and all)?  Maybe someone would also be willing to discuss whether
it is worth making such a determination.  Is it just better to
compile everything as a regular expression, and just not worry
about whether there are metacharacters?  I'm sure efficiency
varies from implementation to implementation.  I just have not
done enough programming in C to know whether compiling a plain
string for use with regex inevitably means a big performance
drop over doing the comparison manually.

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@sophist.uchicago.edu         rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer