[Emacs-bug-tracker] bug#5812: marked as done (expr: Difference in behavior of match and :)

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Your message dated Sun, 4 Apr 2010 22:42:13 -0600
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and subject line Re: bug#5812: expr: Difference in behavior of match and :
has caused the GNU bug report #5812,
regarding expr: Difference in behavior of match and :
to be marked as done.

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5812: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=5812
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--- Begin Message --- Subject: expr: Difference in behavior of match and : Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:35:16 +0530

Hello team,

I have tried following snippet in a bash script:

-bash-3.1$userid=`expr "uid=11008(ADILM) gid=1200(cvs),1400(build)" : ".*uid=[0-9]*(\(.[0-9a-z]*\)) .*"`
-bash-3.1$echo $userid
ADILM
-bash-3.1$

To my knowledge it should not able to extract ADILM as the regex does not include uppercase letters (A-Z).

In the expr man page it is mentioned that:

-----8<----------
match STRING REGEXP
 same as STRING : REGEXP
-----8<----------

So i tried following snippet:-

-bash-3.1$ userid=`expr match "uid=11008(ADILM) gid=1200(cvs),1400(build)"  ".*uid=[0-9]*(\(.[0-9a-z]*\)) .*"`
-bash-3.1$ echo $userid

-bash-3.1$

I changed the regex and added uppercase letters:-
-bash-3.1$ userid=`expr match "uid=11008(ADILM) gid=1200(cvs),1400(build)"  ".*uid=[0-9]*(\(.[0-9A-Za-z]*\)) .*"`
-bash-3.1$ echo $userid
ADILM
-bash-3.1$

So it means that match is not same as ":". As per observation ":" uses case-insensitive matching while match is strict case sensitive matching.

Can you update the man page OR let me know if i am doing anything wrong?

Package:-
-bash-3.1$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/expr
coreutils-5.97-12.1.el5
-bash-3.1$

Thanks and Regards,
Adil Mujeeb

--- End Message ---

> --- Begin Message ---
>
>
>
> Subject: 
>
> Re: bug#5812: expr: Difference in behavior of match and :
>
>
>
>
> Date: 
>
> Sun, 4 Apr 2010 22:42:13 -0600
>
>
>
>
> User-agent: 
>
> Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)
>
>
>
>
> Adil Mujeeb wrote:
> > Thanks Bob for such a nice explanation and your instinct is right. It is
> > locale problem.
> > ...
> > And the other point you made is also right. I didn’t realize that I was
> > using another session for comparing the result with match which ahs
> > different locale:-
>
> I thought it might have been something like that.
>
> > I never knew that locale has effect on the behavior. We can close this bug.
>
> I will close the bug with this message then.
>
> > Thank you so much for your time and details, I have learnt new thing :)
>
> I am glad to have helped!
>
> > Also, thanks for correcting my regex.
>
> Sure thing!
>
> Bob
>
>
> --- End Message ---