Re: emacs 22 - regular-expression isearch on spaces extremely lenient

[don provan <dprovan@comcast.net>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> (setq search-whitespace-regexp nil) will turn this off. When this is nil,
> each space you type matches literally, against one space.

Thanks! This always annoyed me, but I've never seen a mention of the
control variable to turn it off.

>  If non-nil, regular expression to match a sequence of whitespace chars.
>  This applies to regular expression incremental search.

I think the biggest problem with it is the inconsistency between
incremental search and elisp regexp searches. Literally just yesterday
I had to debug a problem caused because my practice regexp at the
command line did what I wanted with a space, but when I used the same
string in a functional search, it didn't. I've seen the documentation
for this feature, but wherever it was, it wasn't clear to me until now
that it was specific to incremental regexp searches rather than a
general feature of all regexp searches.

-don