Re: Use the characters "+" and "-" in regular expressions

[tomas]

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:39:46AM -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> > > Yes, use character sets, e.g. [+] and [-].
> 
> > Plus "+" is special. Minus "-" is not.
> ...
> > Or escape with backslash. Note that due to string syntax you need
> > two of them.
> 
> Yes, correct you are, Tomas. I long ago got used to putting most
> punctuation in character sets regardless of its specialness, if for no
> other reason than to help them stand out when rereading the code
> later [...]

Right: brackets help curbing the multiplication of backslashes.

I've found another strange application for that: "ps waux | grep foo"
will find your "grep foo" in the process list. Decorating one of your
characters in "foo" with brackets will fix that. Hacky, but it works :)

Cheers
 - t

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