[josm-dev] Search and | ?

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:39 AM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> 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 ^.

If this was done it would probably be better to use ~, ^ already has
special meaning so you'd have to do "^^foo:^^bar" to look for a
key/value that started with foo:bar as opposed to "~foo:~bar"

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

This is probably the most sane way to do it. But each part of the
regex as separated by : needs to be considered as its own regex, i.e.:

  regex1:regex2

or:

  "^regex.*containing[^colon:]":^[^a]*$

>  > * http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/1865 - Implement selection stack
>
> Mmmmm, what do you do if something that was selected got deleted?

I defer that question to whatever the current implementation of the
selection box does:)