bug#36372: 27.0.50; replace-regexp-in-string skips START first chars in return value [PATCH]

[Mattias Engdegård]

26 juni 2019 kl. 17.59 skrev Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>:
> 
>> (1) Does this code, in company-coq--loc-fully-qualified-name, actually work 
>> the way you intended? (Looks like it.)
> 
> Yes, I think it does.  It's a bit inscrutable, so here's an annotated copy:

Thanks, so at least it wasn't written blindly from the docs --- good to know.

> This code would probably be clearer if I just used a substring to trim out 
> the beginning of the string ^^

Well I thought so, but who am I to judge? If it works...

>> (2) Did you learn how the START parameter affects the return value by 
>> reading the doc string, the manual, the source code, or by testing?
> 
> Almost certainly the docstring, confirmed by testing.  I haven't looked at 
> this section of the manual. 
> 
>> (3) Are you aware of other code using the START parameter to 
>> replace-regexp-in-string?
> 
> Nothing off the top of my head, but I probably wouldn't have thought of the 
> instance in company-coq either.  A quick grep through my local sources 
> doesn't turn up anything else, but a quick visual check isn't a very reliable 
> method (did you use a plain grep to find the instance in company-coq, or do 
> you have a more sophisticated trick?).

Definitely not sophisticated, just re-purposed my old regexp trawler (attached 
in case you want to try).

Clément, thank you very much for humouring me. We are in the unenviable 
position to decide whether to fix an old, unsatisfactory, apparently very 
rarely used interface, or to document the behaviour. The stakes are low, but it 
looks like the semantics will be kept after all.

26 juni 2019 kl. 17.17 skrev Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> 
> For the manual, I'd expand a bit on this, and explained how to get the
> result you thought you will when using non-nil START (by concatenating
> with the initial substring).

All right, I added a sentence to that effect.

0001-Document-bug-in-replace-regexp-in-string.patch
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trawl.el
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