ietf-nntp Wildmats

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20001121102217.C53590 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:


>Tim Roberts said:
>> If "\" is not treated as an escape character in a set - does that exclude
>> the use of "\s" in a set?

>Yes, and also \u. There is existing practice saying that "[\s]" matches
>backslash or s. There is no existing practice for \u outside sets.

I was just about to agree violently, but then I spotted that Perl REs
allow [\s\t] meaning SP or TAB :-( .

But I still agree. This is existing practice in all other RE-like and
globbing notations that I know of. There are far too many RE notations in
the world as it is, so we should not be introducing new ones.


>The wildmat specification works in terms of *characters*, not octets.

>    "a"           is a character
>    "\u0061"      is a 6 character sequence representing it
>    %xC0 %xA3     is the UTF-encoding of the pound sterling sign which
>                    is a single character
>    "\u00A3"      is a 6 character sequence representing it
ITYM "\uC0A3"
But note that you can still write "£" in your wildmat (that was a GBP
sign, in case somebody's mime can't decipher it).

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