[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #49451] matching beginning/end of a word does not work

[Mike Miller]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #49451 (project octave):

Yeah, this is confusing to me as well. I remembered that I had submitted a fix
for this a while ago.

Turns out that single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings are processed
differently in Octave regexp functions. There are certain escape sequences
that are handled only when the pattern string is a single-quoted string.

These include

*  \b  means a literal backspace character (while it means word boundary in
PCRE syntax)
*  \< \>  mean word boundaries
*  \oNNN  means a specific octal character

So as a workaround, if you use single quotes, then the angle-bracket word
boundary anchors will work. Or use the PCRE word boundary anchor which is just
 \b .

Anyone else care to comment on the reason for relegating these certain escapes
to single quoted strings only?

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