Re: Searching for command options in man pages (searching for a hyphen not represented by ASCII 2d)

[Kevin Rodgers]

Jerry Asher wrote:

> Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> wrote in message 
> news:<87lm0a7ojl.fsf@wesley.springies.com>...
>
> > jerry.nospam@theashergroup.com (Jerry Asher) writes:
> >
> >
> > > In Red Hat (8.0 but I am pretty sure in 7.x as well), in emacs 21.2
> > > hexl-mode shows the bolded hyphen is not ASCII 2D, but is represented
> > > by ASCII 92 (ex).  
> > RHL 8 defaults to a UTF8, iirc.  So you'd have to enter the unicode
> > version of the hyphen... whichever it is that man outputs.  Gee,
> > thanks....
>
> Not only that, but I think the unicode hyphen (-) is different from
> the unicode dash (--).  Bleh. So you have searching for <hyphen>b is
> different than searching for <dash>backup.

So we should bind "-" in isearch-mode-map like " " is bound: to a special
command that searches for a regexp that matches these variations.  The only
tricky thing is that Emacs doesn't provide a separate syntax class for dash/
hyphen, unlike space/tab/newline/formfeed, and I don't know how to represent
the Unicode characters in a regexp string in a way that would be relevant for
other encodings (including single-byte buffers):

HYPHEN is U+2010
EN DASH is U+2013
EM DASH is U+2014

and of course there are many others (e.g. SOFT HYPHEN and NON-BREAKING HYPHEN).

--
<a href="mailto:&lt;kevin.rodgers&#64;ihs.com&gt;";>Kevin Rodgers</a>