ietf-nntp Wildmats

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yld7fvk31l.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


>Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> Suppose \S stands for "please match whitespace here". No, I am not
>> suggesting that as a notation, just to illustrate my argument for now.
>> Then, if PAT follows the current XPAT semantics, we get

>> 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo bar*
>> meaning the same as
>> 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo\Sbar*

>> But now look at
>> 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo,bar bar,baz*
>> meaning the same as
>> 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo,bar\Sbar,baz*

>> The first one looks like it is intended to match:
>> 	Subject: foo bar
>> 	Subject: foo baz
>> 	Subject: bar bar
>> 	Subject: bar baz
>> whereas the second one looks like it is intended to match
>> 	Subject: foo
>> 	Subject: bar bar
>> 	Subject: baz

>> But they can't both be right :-( .

>I don't see this as a significant issue.  We just define in the standard
>what it means.  Personally, I would expect your first command to match
>only "Subject: foo bar" and none of the rest of your examples, but using
>space as alternation seems very odd to me.

I wasn't using space as alternation. What would YOU expect to be
recognised given
	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo,bar bar,baz* ?

>If you want to match the set of things in your first list of Subject
>headers, you can write *foo,bar*.

No, that would recognise
	Subject: xxx foo
and	Subject: bar yyy
but not
	Subject: foo bar
or	Subject: xxx foo bar yyy

because of the requirement that the wildmat is "anchored" at the two ends
of the string to be matched.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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