[josm-dev] Search and | ?

[Russ Nelson]

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason writes:
 > * http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/1864 - Search doesn't support
 > regex search on keys and/or values

The problem is always the user interface.  I can think of several ways
to implement regexps:

1) just implement them.  Instead of doing a liberal substring
search, do a regexp search, always treating their input as a regexp.
That has the unhappy effect of forcing regexp character
interpretation, which may give them results which differ from the
previous behavior (but for the most part would give them the same
results).

2) keep the current substring search for unqualified string searches,
but use regexps if they supply a colon (to search in K:V) or user: .
That has the unhappy effect of not being obvious.

3) use a prefix character to indicate a regexp search, e.g. all
regexps must start with ^.  Not likely that any literal searches would
start with ^.

4) Add it as an option in the Search box:   [] use regular expressions

 > * http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/1865 - Implement selection stack

Mmmmm, what do you do if something that was selected got deleted?

 > Regex search would come in particularly handy. I don't know how hard
 > it would be to hack the tokenizer to support it however as regexes
 > could contain characters that are currently considered tokens, such as
 > : and | and "".

Tokenizer not hard to fix.  It already allows quoted strings, which
may contain anything but a quote character.

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