Re: search-whitespace-regexp

[Miles Bader]

On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:49:42 -0500, Stefan Monnier
<address@hidden> wrote:
> >> Wait.  That doesn't make any sense.  I haven't seen *anyone* ask for plain
> >> search to treat spaces as "just one SPC char".  AFAICT everybody is happy
> >> with the behavior where a space in the search text is interpreted as "any
> >> sequence of blank chars".
> 
> > FWIW, there are definitely cases where I get pissed at regexp-search
> > for doing that -- it's not always the case that one is just searching
> > for words that are separated by "some whitespace", sometimes the
> > actual whitespace matters.
> 
> Right: in *regexp* search.

Er, well, that's the point -- so far it's been a problem only in
regexp search because that feature (whitespace fuzzy matching) has
only been implemented there.  If it's implemented by default in normal
isearch, it might start to be a problem there too.

It might even be a bigger problem because while people generally
expect regexp searches to be a bit fuzzy, they might expect a
non-regexp search to be exact.  Since the fuzzy whitespace matching
often "looks" like normal matching (because the majority of whitespace
is in fact a single space), it might take some time to see what's
going on, resulting in some subtle errors.  This is particularly true
if one embeds a search inside a keyboard macro [which I often do].

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.