Re: find-tag

[Andreas Matthias <andreas.matthias@gmail.com>]

Andreas Matthias wrote:

> I'm trying to `find-tag' a function named `foo.bar' but it seems
> to be impossible to find function names containing a period.
> The name is definitely listed in the TAGS file but is not found
> by `find-tag'. Am I missing something?

Digging through the code of etags.el I found etags-tags-completion-table which
contains a large regex used for parsing the TAGS file. In this regex there
are three character groups like

   [-a-zA-Z0-9_+*$:]

This seems to be the reason why function names containing periods are not
found. If I add the period in these character groups

   [-.a-zA-Z0-9_+*$:]

then `find-tag' finds function names like `foo.bar' (quite common names in Lua).

Are there reasons why the period was omitted in this regex?


Andreas