Thank you.

It's in an 400 line program and I just forgot that the" \" needs to 
coded as "\\"
(
 interesting is that that iteratorconstruct is missing in the hardcopy of

"The GNU Emacs Lisap Reference Manual" for Version 20
and
33.2.1 Syntax of Regular Expressions even says

 "no new special characters will be defined in the future"



rgb wrote:

>>"\ [A-Z]\{3\}\ "
>>
>>should find a 3letter Word surrounded by blanks
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I'm not sure of your indended purpose in the "\ "
>sequence but I'd guess that could be your problem.
>
>All these work fine for me.  Each matches 3 letter words
>with slight differences in what constitutes a word.  For
>example the first won't match a word if it begins in the
>first column or ends in the last column of a line or is
>delimited by punctuation such as a period or comma or is
>preceeded or followed by a tab rather than a space.  The
>2nd allows for tab characters and possibly eol but not
>punctuation.  The 3rd and 4th are very similar.  They
>allow punction, tab, space and eol characters and differ
>only in whether the delimiting character is considered
>part of the match or just required but not actually part
>of it.
>
>Interactively typed          String used programmatically
> [A-Za-z]\{3\} <ret>         " [A-Za-z]\\{3\\} "
>\s-[A-Za-z]\{3\}\s-<ret>     "\\s-[A-Za-z]\\{3\\}\\s-"
>\Sw[A-Za-z]\{3\}\Sw<ret>     "\\Sw[A-Za-z]\\{3\\}\\Sw"
>\b[A-Za-z]\{3\}\b<ret>       "\\b[A-Za-z]\\{3\\}\\b"
>
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