Re: non-greedy regexp don't seem to work

[Michael Gerdau]

In answering my own post:

> Hi list,
> 
> the following two statements should provide the exakt same strings:
> (match:substring (string-match "_(.*?)_" "a_ä_ö_de_fü_") 1)
> (match:substring (string-match "_([^_]*)_" "a_ä_ö_de_fü_") 1)
> 
> However for me they don't. Here is a log how I tested it:
> $ guile
> GNU Guile 2.0.11
> Copyright (C) 1995-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> 
> Guile comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `,show w'.
> This program is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
> under certain conditions; type `,show c' for details.
> 
> Enter `,help' for help.
> scheme@(guile-user)> (match:substring (string-match "_(.*?)_"
> "a_ä_ö_de_fü_") 1)
> $1 = "ä_ö_de_fü"
> scheme@(guile-user)> (match:substring (string-match "_([^_]*)_"
> "a_ä_ö_de_fü_") 1)
> $2 = "ä"
> scheme@(guile-user)> ,q
> 
> I checked the same regexps in Perl and there both results are the same.
> 
> Am I overlooking the obvious or is this a bug ?

In the archive of the guile-devel ML I found a thread that seems to
indicate that guile simply does not support non-greedy regexp, which
is perfectly in line with my findings of above:
https://www.mail-archive.com/guile-devel%40gnu.org/msg12022.html

Unfortunately the guile manual seems to imply that non-greedy regexp
are indeed supported. See
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Regular-Expressions.html#index-regular-expressions
which directly references Regular expressions used in Emacs which do
support non-greedy regexp.

This is misleading if not an outright documentation bug.

Does anybody know where or how to report this ?

Best wishes,
Michael
-- 
 Michael Gerdau       email: address@hidden
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