isearch-forward-regexp " $" becomes "\\s-+$"

isearch-forward-regexp " $" becomes "\\s-+$"

[Dan Jacobson]

The user types  <escape> C-s SPC $ C-s C-s C-s
thinking that he will be searching for the regular expression " $" but
instead he becomes searching for "\\s-+$" ... no wonder it find more
than one asked for... doing C-x esc esc reveals
(isearch-resume "\\s-+$" t nil t "\\s-+$" t)

"If I had wanted to search for that I would have said so.  Alls I
wanted to search for was for lines with a SPC at the end.  Yes, in 4
out of 5 cases I probably want also to do what it proposed, but not
today."
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780

Re: isearch-forward-regexp " $" becomes "\\s-+$"

[Kevin Rodgers]

Dan Jacobson wrote:

> The user types  <escape> C-s SPC $ C-s C-s C-s
> thinking that he will be searching for the regular expression " $" but
> instead he becomes searching for "\\s-+$" ... no wonder it find more
> than one asked for... doing C-x esc esc reveals
> (isearch-resume "\\s-+$" t nil t "\\s-+$" t)
> 
> "If I had wanted to search for that I would have said so.  Alls I
> wanted to search for was for lines with a SPC at the end.  Yes, in 4
> out of 5 cases I probably want also to do what it proposed, but not
> today."


If you want to change the default behavior, customize search-whitespace-regexp.

If you want to retain the default behavior but want to search for a literal SPC,
do the obvious thing: C-q SPC.


-- 
Kevin Rodgers <kevinr@ihs.com>