Re: [bug-gawk] Regex problem with gawk 4.1.2

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi. Thanks for the report.

As Andy answered, there is a bug in this area. If you change your code to

        if (ref ~ /[[,]/) { print "whoo"; }

you should be OK. I plan to release 4.1.3 fairly soon, since this is
a fairly critical bug.

Thanks!

Arnold

> Hi,
>
> One of my venerable awk programs, which I've tried to keep compatible with 
> awk,
> nawk, and gawk for close to 15 years, suddenly broke when run with gawk 4.1.2.
>
> I've reduced the problem to the following little snippet.  The problem seems
> to be with inclusion of an unquoted '[' character within the regex bracket
> expression, but not as the first character.  According to the manual this 
> should
> work [1], and it has indeed worked for me as long as I've worked with awk, but
> doesn't do so any more in 4.1.2:
>
> #!/opt/local/bin/gawk -f
> BEGIN {
>   ref = ",";
>   if (ref ~ /[,[]/) { print "whoo"; }
> }
>
> My copy of gawk 4.1.2 is running on OS X, version 10.9.5, installed with 
> macports,
> and gives its version number as "GNU Awk 4.1.2, API: 1.1"
>
>
> Best regards,
>
>       Henrik
>
> [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Bracket-Expressions.html