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Re: Pattern bug on (a*|)~^(*b)

Le 29/07/2023 à 03:35, Bart Schaefer a écrit :
On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 11:41 PM Stephane Chazelas <stephane@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 

I have to say I'm with the OP and don't understand that explanation
either.
In the absence of a direct response from PWS, I'll just point you to his comments in pattern.c, some of which date from before we had a 
git repository: [...]
By my reading, zero-length matches may be short-circuited to avoid pathological behavior. 

Thank you for your answers, though the latter is rather obscure to me.

If you can answer, or if PWS reads this:

What globbing should do is one thing, but in the meantime I'm interested
to know what I can safely put on the left-hand side of ~ with the
current implementation. Does this behavior concern any case of
backtracking, or only (...|...) patterns, or, which would be even
better, only (|...) and (...|) patterns?

In my project, I use globbing to find files with tags matching patterns
provided by the user, because I noticed that it's much faster than
anything else I tried, and I use ()~^() and (|) as AND and OR operators.
As an example, here is the pattern generated for files with tags matching pat1: 

*[[](((* |)pat1( *|)))[]]*

which I could easily replace with:

*[[](((* )#pat1( *)#))[]]*
Then this would be the pattern for files with pat1 and pat2 and neither pat3 nor pat4:
*[[](((* )#pat1( *)#)~^((* )#pat2( *)#))[]]*~*[[](((* )#pat3( *)#|(* )#pat4( *)#))[]]*
So I'm thinking I could filter for user-provided patterns that contain '|' and don't put them in the mega-pattern but filter for them post-globbing. Does that sound like a sound solution to you? 

--
Johan
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