Dodo used (read: stole) the e// notation from the ed school of syntax, most other users of this syntax support regex matching and this was always a potential feature for dodo.
PCRE is probably too much but POSIX regex should be sufficient.
Regex search is probably too expensive as in the failure case it would have to go through the whole file, but an anchored regex match (match from current position or die, similar to `expect) could be quite useful.
A potential issue here is of course that any multiple-character matches could be dangerous m/a.*z/, especially if they are greedy by default.
We could make .* NOT match newline characters, but this only helps in the case of files being newline delimited and I think we need to consider the case of operating on large files that lack newlines (however we could just push this issue onto the end user).
Dodo used (read: stole) the
e//notation from the ed school of syntax, most other users of this syntax support regex matching and this was always a potential feature for dodo.PCRE is probably too much but POSIX regex should be sufficient.
Regex search is probably too expensive as in the failure case it would have to go through the whole file, but an anchored regex match (match from current position or die, similar to `expect) could be quite useful.
A potential issue here is of course that any multiple-character matches could be dangerous
m/a.*z/, especially if they are greedy by default.We could make
.*NOT match newline characters, but this only helps in the case of files being newline delimited and I think we need to consider the case of operating on large files that lack newlines (however we could just push this issue onto the end user).