On Sun, 20 Apr 2025 at 13:46, Richard Owlett <rowl...@access.net> wrote: > On 4/20/25 7:56 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 07:27:12AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> I need to understand the entity goals of Kate, Kwrite, and Katepart. > I.E. In a discussion of "regular expressions", does it matter which of > those packages is referred to? I dont use KDE. But a few seconds of searching finds the info below. (Assuming that these documentation links are current, perhaps they are not). https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/kate/regular-expressions.html says: For information about using regular expressions in Kate, see the Regular Expressions appendix to the KatePart Handbook. https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/kwrite/index.html says: KWrite is a simple interface to the KatePart component also used by Kate, KDevelop, and other applications from KDE that require advanced text editing. Therefore, complete documentation for all the features of KWrite can be found in the KatePart Handbook. https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/katepart/regular-expressions.html says: This Appendix contains a brief but hopefully sufficient and covering introduction to the world of regular expressions. It documents regular expressions in the form available within KatePart, which is not compatible with the regular expressions of perl, nor with those of for example grep. So according to the above, Kate, Kwrite and KatePart all use the same regular expression engine, which is nowhere specified except to say that it is not the same as PERL or POSIX Basic or Extended regex. According to [1] it might be [2], which at a glance looks like it uses PCRE (ie PERL, contradicting the above statement). Hopefully I've got this sufficiently wrong that someone will jump in with the correct info. > I.E. In a discussion of "regular expressions", does it matter which of > those packages is referred to? Unfortunately there is a confusing assortment of many different implementations of regular expressions with subtle differences, even though they are all broadly similar. But, as a beginner using regular expressions, you won't have context for understanding these differences until you get some experience with them. Quite likely those difference won't ever matter to you at all. If and when they do matter, by that stage you will have learned enough to be able to adapt. So, just pick one tool and learn to use it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_regular_expression_engines [2] https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/corelib/text/qregularexpression.cpp
