Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!wucs1!wugate!wupost!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!huxtable
From: huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Kathryn Huxtable)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Re: replace-regexp
Message-ID: <5211@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Date: 15 Apr 89 18:52:46 GMT
References: <8904130343.AA05725@starbase>
Distribution: gnu
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services
Lines: 31

In article <8904130343.AA05725@starbase>, israel@STARBASE.MITRE.ORG (Bruce Israel) writes:
>    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.  [stuff deleted]  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.

I hate beating a dead fish, but regular expressions are dear to my
heart.  I agree completely.  "Natural" regular expressions should
replace the natural thing.  The workarounds were convoluted.  I know
that "natural" is sometimes hard to pin down, but I don't think this
is such a case.

-Kathryn Huxtable
huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu