Re: searching and regex miniguide -- now new wiki page
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Oct 07, 2010
- 1422 views
The metachacters ? and * simply do not mean the same thing in wildcards (where they match characters) and regex (where they specify repetition of a previous term).
Agreed.
The regex repetition metacharacters ?, +, *, and {} are sufficiently complex enough to warrant their own section
Completely agree.
mentioning them in a section not even related to regex would be confusing even if it was correct.
Ive removed the wildcard/regex comparison table again because making it look nicer does not make it any less bogus.
I strongly disagree with this. The guide should explain the separate (and very difference) usages of both the wildcad metacharacters and regex metacharacters (or at least touch very briefly on this, and point out links to find out more). At this point, a guide contrasting regex and wildcards is quite useful, especially if one is very familiar with how to use wildcards but completely new to regexes.
A table showing how the same identical string can lead to different results, depending on if it's interpreted as a regex or as a wildcard match, make these differences far easier to grasp.
Additionally, a table showing how to perform the same actions using both wildcards and regex, side-by-side, would be quite handy as a quick reference.
The comparison table you deleted appears to fit with the above goals, and should be restored.
