Re: Dealing with empty strings in regexp.

On Tuesday, June 18, 2013 7:51:06 AM UTC-5, Paul Isambert wrote:
>
> > Doing substitutions with a pattern that matches the empty string is
>
> > not useful, in real editing tasks it's not what is wanted. One is
>
> > always trying to match *something*.
>
>
>
> The "*" operator should be banned, then!
>

The * should not be used by itself. But it is very useful in combination with other stuff.

For example, I use a tool which generates variable names automatically from graphically-created GUI widgets. I'm sometimes not sure whether there is a single _, two __, or none at all between two parts of a variable name, so I'll search for something like "firstpart_*secondpart". Other examples (not even auto-generated) are when there might be a word in between, like "firstpart\w*secondpart".

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