Enrico Tröger wrote:
I had a short look at your examples but to be honest for me this is just not that important. I surely can find more corner cases where the one or the other regexp/special character combination won't work. Either you write a patch to make things better or you maybe just use tools which are more specialised for such tasks like grep, sed and friends.
Take it or leave it, it's your software. regexp by these days is pretty much a standard and there are certain expectations people have when an engine claims to "support regexp". It's irrelevant to say "oh well I don't think these standards matter" because people will get tripped up.
If you expect everyone to "write a patch", there's no point for bug-reporting systems. Not everyone has the time to go looking through the source code.
Geany uses the regexp implementation of Scintilla, the used editing component. It's not as good as it could be but it does the job and it doesn't pull in new, external dependencies like libpcre. Please read the documentation to learn more about the use of regular expressions within Find and Replace dialogs in Geany. There are some limitations and differences but generally it just works.
Well excuse me for not looking through the source code before I filed the bug. I will forward this onto Scintilla, then. Also (as I said before), regexp is a *standard* - people should not HAVE to look through documentation to find out the exact quirks of a particular implementation.
BTW libpcre is really not a problem for *NIX - most systems will have some important component that depends on it anyway. And for windows/mac you can just static-link it.