bug#16046: Bug with Regexp Containing only a Character Class with a Caret

[Cameron Desautels]

Hi all,

I've run across a dilemma, in the most literal sense: either there's a
problem in Emacs's regexp engine or there's an issue with
`regexp-opt-charset`---I'm not sure which.

The issue has to do with regular expressions containing character
classes with only a caret character.  I know this seems like a rather
silly case (why not just use "\\^"?) but it came up in the context of
trying to track down a bug in ruby-mode, so it does occur in real (and
particularly *programmatic*) settings.

The simplest case to reproduce is the following:

    (re-search-forward "[^]")
    ; => Debugger entered--Lisp error: (invalid-regexp "Unmatched [ or [^")
    ;   re-search-forward("[^]")
    ;   eval((re-search-forward "[^]") nil)
    ;   eval-last-sexp-1(t)
    ;   eval-last-sexp(t)
    ;   eval-print-last-sexp()
    ;   call-interactively(eval-print-last-sexp record nil)
    ;   command-execute(eval-print-last-sexp record)
    ;   execute-extended-command(nil "eval-print-last-sexp")
    ;   call-interactively(execute-extended-command nil nil)

Now, you can make a compelling case that that's not a valid regexp
(and the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual doesn't seem to *directly*
contradict this argument), but that presents a problem when paired
with `regexp-opt-charset`:

    (regexp-opt-charset '(?^))
    => "[^]"

Note that that produces the problem regexp; which is to say that the
following code is bound to fail when it should succeed:

    (re-search-forward (regexp-opt-charset '(?^)))

What's the correct behavior? I'd be happy to offer a patch for either
side of the equation but I'm not sure which one to target.

All the best.

-- Cameron


In GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin11.4.2, Carbon Version 1.6.0
AppKit 1138.51)
 of 2013-05-13 on atago
Windowing system distributor `Apple Inc.', version 10.9.0
Configured using:
 `configure '--with-mac'
 '--enable-mac-app=/Users/xin/Documents/emacs-mac-port/build'
 '--prefix=/Users/xin/Documents/emacs-mac-port/build''

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