Re: WIP _units

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2026 at 6:06 PM Mark J. Reed <markjreed@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2026 at 7:07 AM Oliver Kiddle <opk@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> christopher@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> > i'm trying to update _units to allow completion for e.g. `units area_<TAB>`
>> > which currently breaks with the underscore. I couldn't make out what i have
>> > to add to compadd to make this work.
>> > Any suggestions?
>>
>> The problem is with the two compset commands early in the function which
>> try to strip off characters not belonging to the units like numbers. They
>> are removing `area_` from the completion matching because of the
>> underscore. Try adding the _ into those patterns too:
>>
>>   compset -P '*[^[:alnum:]_]'
>>   compset -S '[^[:alnum:]_]*'
>>
>> >  testfiles=(
>> > -  /usr/share/units.dat               # GNU on Fedora
>>
>> Did you make any actual changes here or is this purely realignment?
>>
>> On my system, more than one file matches including an extra currency
>> one. The completion ignores that second file. I can't see why it needs a
>> loop instead of something like $^testfiles(N) adding also Y1 to the
>> qualifier if only one should be matched.
>>
>> > -units=(${${all:#^[[:alnum:]]##([\(\]]*|)}%%\(*})
>> > +units=(${${all:#^[0-9A-z_]##([\(\]]*|)}%%\(*})
>>
>> I'd keep the character class rather than use something like A-z which
>> may include 6 extra ASCII characters, so e.g:
>>
>>   units=( ${${all:#^[[:alnum:]_]##([\(\]]*|)}%%\(*} )
>>
>> Oliver
>
> Yeah, I wouldn't use [A-z]. Also adding _ to it to get [A-z_] is redundant, because the _ is already included in the A-z range, along with [, \, ], ^, and `.
>
>  For most applications [[:alnum::]] is best. Of course, it's also locale-dependent; in the C locale it's equivalent to [A-Za-z0-9], but in other locales it can include characters outside the ASCII range. Last I checked, units(1) was ASCII-only (e.g. it uses u- instead of μ- for micro-).

(Please don't top post, it's a pain to fix.)

You might want to check again,
You have: µm
You want:
        Definition: micro m = 1e-06 m

-- 
Mikael Magnusson