goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) (03/18/90)
Call it laziness, or call it what you want. Does anyone have a function lying around that determines whether a given string contains metacharacters (i.e. which takes into account escapes and all)? Maybe someone would also be willing to discuss whether it is worth making such a determination. Is it just better to compile everything as a regular expression, and just not worry about whether there are metacharacters? I'm sure efficiency varies from implementation to implementation. I just have not done enough programming in C to know whether compiling a plain string for use with regex inevitably means a big performance drop over doing the comparison manually. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet goer@sophist.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer