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Re: Why is / a metachar in regular expressions ?
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Re: Why is / a metachar in regular expressions ?


  • Subject: Re: Why is / a metachar in regular expressions ?
  • From: Gabriel Zachmann via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>
  • Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 23:43:43 +0200

>> I don't see why / is a meta character.
>> It does not appear anywhere else in the documentation as metacharacter.
>
> In some languages "/" is used as the delimiter to begin/end a regular
> expression, for example in sed where the substitution command is "s/old/new/".

Right, good point - same in vi and vim (the editor).

>
> So perhaps the underlying regex parser ignores "/" characters at the
> start/end of the regex unless they're quoted?

Maybe, but I couldn't find any hint in the docs.


> Is it used to refer to groups in text replacement? Sometimes that's a dollar
> sign, sometimes a slash, but I thought it was a backslash

Good point , but
-  IIRC, vim, at least, uses backslash for that, e.g., \1 ,\2, etc.;
-  furthermore, NSRegularExpression does not do any text replacement by itself,
as far as I can see?


Oh well, right now , I just don't escape any / , and it seems to work just fine.


Best regards, Gabriel

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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: Why is / a metachar in regular expressions ?
      • From: Rick Mann via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Why is / a metachar in regular expressions ? (From: Gabriel Zachmann via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Why is / a metachar in regular expressions ? (From: Jens Alfke via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>)

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