Re: [BUGS] BUG #14628: regex description in online documentation misleadingly/wrong

"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes:
> ​So basically you feel its necessary for us to redundantly emphasize the
> fact that we default to ARE because its different from your default choice
> and, you imply but do not support, the choice of the majority of other
> regular expression implementations.

I can't get excited about this.  It seems fairly difficult to me to make
the case that more people would take "POSIX regular expression" to mean
the basic form than the extended form.  Most of our users probably don't
know the difference in the first place, and would consider section 9.7.3.1
to be *the* definition of what an RE is to Postgres.  Those who do know
the difference would probably also turn to 9.7.3.1 to find out which form
we're talking about.  Once you get there, the requested information is
pretty much the first thing you find.

It's possible that we should restructure the section nesting to bring
9.7.3.1 up a level and thus make it more visible.  I'm thinking something
like

9.7.1. LIKE
9.7.2. SIMILAR TO Regular Expressions
9.7.3. POSIX Regular Expression Operators
9.7.4. POSIX Regular Expression Definition

But that would be doing some violence to the basic structure of the
chapter.  We don't have separate sections for the definition of LIKE
patterns or SIMILAR TO patterns --- admittedly, they hardly need it.

One really simple change that might be worth doing is to turn the
sentence "The POSIX pattern language is described in much greater detail
below" into an actual link to 9.7.3.1.  Once upon a time there wasn't
much material in between, but now it seems like a clickable link would
be good.
        regards, tom lane


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