Path: utzoo!telly!philmtl!uunet!talos!kjones
From: kjones@talos.uu.net (Kyle Jones)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Re: re-search-backward on ".*"
Message-ID: <1989Dec14.144456.9918@talos.uu.net>
Date: 14 Dec 89 14:44:56 GMT
References: <8912122248.AA18027@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Reply-To: kjones@talos.uu.net
Distribution: gnu
Lines: 17

David Stampe writes:
 > In GNU Emacs 18.51.3 of Mon Jun  6 1988 on uhccux (berkeley-unix)
 > 
 > (re-search-backward ".*") with the cursor after a line of chars
 > doesn't move at all, i.e. it matches the MINIMAL instead of maximal
 > match. [...]  This is so bad a bug I can't understand why I haven't
 > seen it before.  Am I dreaming?

You're not dreaming; I had similar difficulties when I was trying to get
VM's digest parser to skip backward over consecutive message delimiters.
I was using the `+' operator.  I eventually had to use a while loop
because I couldn't persuade re-search-backward to match more than one
delimiter per call.

It's almost as if re-search-backward works by moving backward a
character at a time and calling re-search-forward with the appropriate
arguments, although I'm sure that's not quite the way it's done.