Re: Unquoted special characters in regexps

[Andreas Schwab]

martin rudalics <address@hidden> writes:

> That of closing a character alternative.  When you write
>
> (defvar foo "]")
> (defvar bar "\\]")
>
> you can't interchangeably use `foo' and `bar' in an arbitrary regular
> expression.  Some people call this "referential transparency".

Of course you can't, since the meaning of '\' is context dependent.

> Anyway, the first `]' has a special meaning but it's not "inside" the
> character alternative.

It is part of it, just like the leading '['.

> It does have a special meaning because `]' is special _outside_
> character alternatives.

This is wrong.  Outside of a character set ']' has no special meaning
whatsoever, independent of the context.

> According to the Elisp manual all these exhibit "poor practice" since
> you didn't quote the second `]'s.

It's a bug in the manual.

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
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