bug#9681: Broken behaviour of re-search-backward (.+ matching only a single character)

[Štěpán Němec]

Quoting from <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.user/15052>:

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> What am I doing wrong?

Nothing, I think :-). I personally don't use fancy split-
ting, but a deeper look at (at least Gnus 5.13's) code seems
to locate the culprit in Emacs' *backward* regular expres-
sion "non-greedity": Position point at the end of
"bugzilla.gdm", C-u C-r "\w+" - et voilà, only one character
is matched.

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If this curious inconsistency of `re-search-backward' with
`re-search-forward' is intentional (which I hope it is not), it should
be documented, but I couldn't find anything in the manuals or
docstrings.

-- 
Štěpán