Re: Another issue with thingatpt

[Bob Rogers]

   From: Andreas Roehler <address@hidden>
   Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 10:25:35 +0100

   > Both interfaces (ffap and thing-at-point) are already customizable,
   > though in different ways. 

   There is no `defcustom'-form in thingatpt.el,
   it's done mostly with `defvar'. Wouldn't conceive that
   as customizable.

Not in the sense of defcustom, no.  But someone who can't "customize" it
themselves via setq is probably not going to be able to change these
hairy regexps and/or char-classes without shooting themselves in the
foot.  It's not just a matter of understanding Emacs regexps, but
understanding how thing-at-point uses them.

   In any case, it seems to me that users shouldn't need to change the
regexp proper, since that is defined by RFC3986, just the set of
punctuation characters to drop at the end.  The only thing that needs to
be customized is just the "lose the punctuation" heuristic, IMHO.  And
the definition of "punctuation" should be enlarged so that it addresses
Slawomir's issue with parens, which are not even allowed internally.

   The problem mentioned originally however shouldn't occur, as

   ,----
   | (defvar thing-at-point-url-path-regexp
   |   "[^]\t\n \"'()<>[^`{}]*[^]\t\n \"'()<>[^`{}.,;]+"
   |   "A regular expression probably matching the host and filename or 
   e-mail part of a URL.")
   `----

   includes that char. The error must reside elsewhere.

   Regards,

   Andreas Roehler

It does include a ";" in the second character class, but both are
inverted.  The second set is the same as the first set with the addition
of ".,;", which is why it refuses to match any of these characters at
the end of the URL.  This would be easier to see if the regexp were
written this way:

        (defvar thing-at-point-url-path-regexp
                (concat "[^]\t\n \"'()<>[^`{}]*"
                        "[^]\t\n \"'()<>[^`{}.,;]+")
          "A regular expression probably matching the host and filename or 
e-mail part of a URL.")

                                        -- Bob