bug#26082: sed bug: . (dot) does not match all characters.

[Roger Wolff]

Hi, 

I spent half an hour preparing the below bugreport and
while reading the bug submission guidlines the last hint
asks me not to report this issue. 

I must say that I find it inconsistent to, in the first
items you report that gnu SED does not adhere to POSIX
because posix behaviour is "stupid", and then in the last
"known issue"/"frequently reported bug" you decide to 
adhere to the stupid POSIX defined behaviour. 

Unix is about being able to quickly do powerful things
with the basic tools that do one thing and to it well. 

Sed is now failing in that respect, because this 
supposedly simple task took me WAY too long. 

        Roger. 


--------------------


It seems that a bunch of files distributed by a big company, and 
used by an open source project have a weird character in it. On the
forum people are having trouble finding a commandline that
fixes (removes) the bad character. My first thought was: that
should be easy. 

The line is: 
  *           - Macros to access peripheral�s registers hardware

but matching the "bad" character to delete it is tricky. 
matching perip.... works, but once you hit the wierd character
I can't get sed to match it. 

I can change the charcter to a normal ascii quote with 
  tr '\222' "\'"

The bad character is 0x92 or octal 222. it would seem it was 
used where a quote would normally writen. The annoyance of this
character is that "grep" tags the file as "binary" due to this
single character. 

sed (GNU sed) 4.2.2
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Jay Fenlason, Tom Lord, Ken Pizzini,
and Paolo Bonzini.
GNU sed home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/>.
General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>.
E-mail bug reports to: <address@hidden>.
Be sure to include the word ``sed'' somewhere in the ``Subject:'' field.

        Roger Wolff. 

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