Re: Problem with re-search-backward and "\\="

[Greg Hill]

At 8:13 AM +0000 9/17/03, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> OK, I think I've got it now.  It finds the _minimum_ match it can.

Well, not exactly.  It finds the longest "rightmost" match it can. 
Searching backward, once it has found a character that can serve as 
the beginning of a complete match, it then still finds the longest 
match possible starting from that point.  For example, starting with 
(point) just in front of the "b" in "fooooo gooo bar", 
(re-search-backward "[fg]o*" nil t) will find and return "gooo", not 
just "go", as the string returned by (match-string 0).

> For what I actually need to do (moving back any
> combination of whitespace and a few things like "//." as the first
> non-space stuff on a line), I can do it easily enough by hand.

It sounds to me like the functions skip-chars-forward, 
skip-chars-backward, skip-syntax-forward and skip-syntax-backward 
will probably serve you well.

--Greg