Re: Word boundary anchors \< and \> not parsed correctly on the right side of =~

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 10:46:13PM -0300, marcelpaulo@gmail.com wrote:
> Word boundary anchors \< and \> are not parsed correctly on the right side of 
> a =~ regex match expression. 

Bash uses ERE (Extended Regular Expressions) here.  There is no \< or \>
in an ERE.

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap09.html#tag_09_04

> This evaluates as false:
> 
>     [[ 'foo bar' =~ \<foo\> ]]

Well, of course it does, because \< is just a literal less-than sign
in a POSIX ERE.

wooledg:~$ re='\<foo\>'
wooledg:~$ [[ '<foo>' =~ $re ]] && echo yes
yes

You might as well remove the backslashes, because they serve no purpose
here.  If you thought they meant "word boundary" or something, you're
in the wrong language.