[wplug] OT: Emacs, regular expressions and syntax highlighting

Dave Ostroske eksortso at gmail.com
Thu Apr 4 13:00:44 EDT 2013


George, I deal with a lot of regular expressions, but what you said is true
and clear. There are no standards for regular expressions, though in modern
implementations, Perl sets an ideal.

This isn't an off-topic discussion at all, by the way. This mailing list
thrives on technical topics like this.

-- Dave Ostroske
On Apr 4, 2013 8:25 AM, "George Larson" <george.g.larson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 10:44 PM, Terence J. Golightly <
> terencejgolightly at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Are regular expressions standardized at all between applications?  Bash,
> > Sed, Awk, Emacs, Vi/Vim etc, etc.
> >
> >
> Similar to the way that the 'standard' of ECMAScript gives derivatives
> (e.g., JavaScript, ActionScript) and SQL is executed differently in its
> various forms, so it is with RE.
>
> So if you know RE in one form then much of your knowledge is likely to
> carry over to other variants.  Though, you may run into situations where
> the implementation of RE does not, for example, support something familiar
> such as look-arounds.  Perl's RE differs somewhat from VIM's, for example.
>
> Though, I am not highly skilled with RE (hence my fumbling attempts to
> answer OP) so somebody else may be able to give a better answer.
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