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Comment #1 posted on 2018-10-26 10:17:21 by Mad Sweeney

Quoted Literals in Regex

Hi,

It seems the rule of quoted literals doesn't apply if the RHS is a variable. So a variable with a quoted "." would try to match a quote followed by . followed by another quote.
If you wanted to match a quote in a literal RE you would have to write "."
The following Bash snippet illustrates:

#!/bin/bash

v=0
for r in '^a.b$' '^a"."b$' "^a'.'b$"; do
((v++))
# matches var 1 only
[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match var $v
# matches var 2 only
[[ 'a"."b' =~ $r ]] && echo match double quote $v
# matches var 3 only
[[ "a'.'b" =~ $r ]] && echo match single quote $v
# all 3 match
eval "[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match eval $v"
done

I find the numerous ways of testing in Bash confusing. I have to look up the manual every time I come back to Bash scripting. I hope posting about it will help keep it in the brain.

--Mad

Comment #2 posted on 2018-10-26 14:12:00 by Mad Sweeney

Re: Quoted Literals in Regex

It also seems like HPR comments eats backslashes!
Here's my comment showing where backslashes should be.
Would be good if there was a preview comment option:

It seems the rule of quoted literals doesn't apply if the RHS is a variable. So a variable with a quoted "." would try to match a quote followed by . followed by another quote.
If you wanted to match a quote in a literal RE you would have to write {backslash}"{backslash}.{backslash}"
A literal RE "." would be like unquoted {backslash}.
The following Bash snippet illustrates:

#!/bin/bash

v=0
for r in '^a{backslash}.b$' '^a"."b$' "^a'.'b$"; do
((v++))
# matches var 1 only
[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match var $v
# matches var 2 only
[[ 'a"."b' =~ $r ]] && echo match double quote $v
# matches var 3 only
[[ "a'.'b" =~ $r ]] && echo match single quote $v
# all 3 match
eval "[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match eval $v"
done

Comment #3 posted on 2018-10-26 15:23:27 by Stuart Little

quoting portions of regex

Re: the previous comment by Mad Sweeney:

You can quote portions of variables on the RHS just fine, but for the match to work the overall pattern you're trying to match must not be enclosed in *outer* quotes. So for instance, the following modification of your script works fine (matches):

---
server="hackerpublicradio.org"

for re in
publicradio"."org
do
echo "Using regular expression: $re"
if [[ $server =~ $re ]]; then
echo "This is HPR"
else
echo "No match"
fi
done
---

Note that there are no outside quotes on publicradio"."org.

The issue was visible from the echoes given out by bash. When you received the message

Using regular expression: ^(hacker|hobby)publicradio"."org$
No match

you can see bash was searching for actual quotes around the period, which of course are not there in the string $server.

Comment #4 posted on 2018-10-26 22:23:16 by Mad Sweeney

Re: Quoted Literals in Regex

The quirk Dave refers to is that you can remove the meta-status of a character in a literal RHS by quoting it so abc'.'def only matches abc.def but not abcxdef, and that it seems there is no way to do that using a regex in a variable: in a variable you only have the traditional backslash escape which you can also use in a literal regex.

--Mad

Comment #5 posted on 2018-10-27 10:09:51 by Dave Morriss

Thanks for the combined wisdom being directed at my question

Thanks to Mad Sweeney and Stuart Little for commenting on this issue.

In the light of your comments my simple tests were these:

$ [[ 'axb' =~ a.b ]] && echo "Match"
Match
- The RE on the right uses '.' as a metacharacter

$ [[ 'axb' =~ a'.'b ]] && echo "Match"
- The "meta-ness" of the '.' is removed by quoting, so no match

$ [[ 'a.b' =~ a'.'b ]] && echo "Match"
Match
- Proving that a literal match works

$ re="a'.'b"
$ [[ 'a.b' =~ $re ]] && echo "Match"
- Now the match fails if the RE is in a variable

$ eval "[[ 'a.b' =~ $re ]] && echo Match"
Match
- Following Mad Sweeney's lead, the 'eval' substitutes in the contents of '$re' so it looks to the extended test like the literal string we used earlier, and thus it works.

My working hypothesis is that the Bash logic processing this can deal with quoted metacharacters in a "bare string" but isn't used when the RE is in a variable - or maybe in any case where expansion is needed to provide the RHS argument.

You'd have to think this was a bug I guess.

Comment #6 posted on 2018-10-27 10:31:10 by Dave Morriss

Backslashes in comments

Yes, there's a bug in the comment code (or what I call a bug).

I think that, in the spirit of avoiding the "Little Bobby Tables" error the comment text is being sanitised, but the sanitisation includes backslash removal.

You can include a backslash at the moment, but you need to double it: backslash '\'

We'll have a look at this issue.

Dave

Comment #7 posted on 2018-10-27 21:37:10 by Mad Sweeney

Not just backslashes

It's eating ampersands too! Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Comment #8 posted on 2018-10-27 22:00:20 by Dave Morriss

Comments eating ampersands?

I don't see evidence of ampersand eating. Could you point to an example?

My earlier comment #5 had ampersands galore and they are all visible, unless I'm missing something. They are being turned into HTML entities of course, but that's what you'd expect.

Comment #9 posted on 2018-10-27 23:59:10 by Mad Sweeney

Re: Comments eating ampersands?

Apologies Dave, It's a bug in the screen reader: reading one ampersand where there are two.
[I must dump all this proprietary as soon as possible.]

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