Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!STARBASE.MITRE.ORG!israel
From: israel@STARBASE.MITRE.ORG (Bruce Israel)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Re: replace-regexp
Message-ID: <8904130343.AA05725@starbase>
Date: 13 Apr 89 03:43:37 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
Lines: 25


   From: mailrus!sharkey!itivax!umich!zip!spencer@purdue.edu  (Spencer W. Thomas)

   In some article loic%axis_d@axis.axis.fr writes:

   >   (replace-regexp "^." "" ())
   >   It empties my buffer !
   >   It should skip to the next new-line. Don't you think so ?

   Well, no.  Emacs is a character-oriented editor, NOT a line-oriented
   editor.  Would you want it to skip to the next line after each
   replacement if the strings were (say) "abc" and ""?  

No, it shouldn't skip to the next line, but it SHOULD skip past the
previously matched string.  i.e. replacing "foo bar" with "foo" should not
change "foo bar bar " to "foo", it should become "foo bar".  A replacement
should not be re-run on the results of the replacement.  Effectively, a
replace-<whatever> should look like it found all non-overlapping occurences
of the search item first, and then did the change second.  For a similar 
example, should the null op (replace-string "a" "a") be an infinite loop?

I think that the workarounds given for this problem are excessively
complicated for the task the guy is trying to perform.

Bruce