peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (02/26/89)
(moved to tech... I'm getting pretty technical here) In article <9499@louie.udel.EDU>, AXTBF%ALASKA.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Tim Friest - programmer at large) writes: > I don't see where you want to do string pattern matching using the DOS > string pattern matching patterns outside of DOS??? How about in an editor? The AmigaDOS regular expressions are, I think, fully equivalent to the UNIX 'ed' regular expressions. That is, anything you can express in 'ed' regexps you can express in AmigaDOS regexps. In fact, I think they're more powerful, since they have alternation... which 'ed' doesn't. For example, how would you specify "(if|for|while|do|switch)" in ed? Yes, they're always fully anchored. That's probably repairable. Look at the Software tools routines: MATCH is defined in terms of AMATCH, which is an anchored match. The only problem with the AmigaDOS wildcards is that the escape character (literal quote character: "*" in AmigaDOS, "\" in UNIX, and "@" in the Software Tools book) is overloaded by DOS as a synonym for Input() and Output(). It's not too late to switch to the more common backslash in the next release of DOS. Almost no third-party programs implement it anyway, so there's room to set a better standard... one which is more likely to be followed. -- Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva `-_-' Hackercorp. ...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.uu.net 'U`