Re: Minor regexp bug - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Greg Stark
Subject Re: Minor regexp bug
Date
Msg-id CAM-w4HO5BX4K_QHhr+dxnkvUhS4mJR919_oUUbqNKzXaNBaa-w@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Minor regexp bug  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Minor regexp bug  (Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 2:32 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> What I'm wondering about is whether to back-patch this.  It's possible
> that people have written patterns like this and not realized that they
> aren't doing quite what's expected.  Getting a failure instead might not
> be desirable in a minor release.  On the other hand, wrong answers are
> wrong answers.


I would say wrong answers are wrong answers. It's hard to believe
there are many people doing this but if they are they're certainly
expecting the look-ahead to actually test that it's looking at the
same thing as the capturing parens. It might even be something
security-critical like parsing an connection string or something like
that. I can't see it's doing people any favours to let their code
continue doing something unexpected to avoid new errors.

-- 
greg



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