[kde-doc-english] kate and non-greedy regular expressions

[Matthew Woehlke]

(Sorry if this multi-posts, it seems to have bounced from k-d-e and I
don't know why it never showed on kwrite-devel... Moderators, if you see 
this, please *reject* the one from the obviously-bogus mail address.)

WK wrote:
> I quote Kate documentation:
> "Greed
> When using quantifiers with no maximum, regular expressions defaults
> to match as much of the searched string as possible, commonly known as
> greedy behavior.
> Modern regular expression software provides the means of “turning off
> greediness”, though in a graphical environment it is up to the
> interface to provide you with access to this feature. For example a
> search dialog providing a regular expression search could have a check
> box labeled “Minimal matching” as well as it ought to indicate if
> greediness is the default behavior."

This feature IIRC is not present in Qt (there was discussion about this
not so long ago on kwrite-devel). Therefore it probably does not make
sense that the documentation should talk about it.

It might be added at some point in the future, but isn't there now.

> I can't find possibility to search non-greedy RE,
> for example i want to get rid of every HTML-tag in some HTML document
> without losing any content. Is this possible in Kate?

You can always search for something that won't match too much, e.g.
'<[^>]+>' will match exactly one SGML tag (not the contents thereof,
however, just the opening tag). I suspect it is not possible without
non-greedy regexp to find e.g. "<p>some <i>text</i></p>", though I think
you can find e.g. "<i>text</i>" for arbitrary tags.

-- 
Matthew
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