From: ken <gebser@mousecar.com>
To: GNU Emacs List <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
Subject: Finding end of sentence[ was Re: Understanding ... Sentence Boundaries]
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 09:32:31 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <50C8957F.6060103@mousecar.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87ip8792j8.fsf@ericabrahamsen.net>
On 12/12/2012 02:02 AM Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> ken<gebser@mousecar.com> writes:
>
>> On 12/11/2012 07:03 AM Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>>> ken<gebser@mousecar.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 06/26/2010 11:05 PM Deniz Dogan wrote:
>>>>> 2010/6/27 ken<gebser@mousecar.com>:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 06/26/2010 06:53 AM Paul Drummond wrote:
>>>>>>> Thanks for the responses guys.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> ....
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> Is it possible to specify word boundaries for a particular mode?
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, it's part of the syntax table. See e.g. `modify-syntax-entry'.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the pointer to that function.
>>>>
>>>> The behavior I see in need of repair is the role of so-called "comments"
>>>> in sentence syntax.</tag> For instance, immediately before this
>>>> sentence are two spaces... which should signify the end of the
>>>> previous sentence. But functions like "forward-sentence" and
>>>> "fill-paragraph" and "backward-sentence" don't recognize it.
>>>>
>>>> Said another way, the "</tag>" string obscures the relationship
>>>> between the period before it and the two spaces after it and so fails
>>>> to see that one sentence ends and another starts. This occurs in
>>>> text-mode and seems to be inherited by other modes.
>>>>
>>>> If I'm reading "modify-syntax-entry" correctly, the default meanings
>>>> of '<' and'>' are, respectively, beginning and end of comment, so
>>>> modifying them wouldn't fix this problem. Or can this be remedied by
>>>> a change in the syntax table? Or is this a bug?
>>>
>>> For this particular case, I think you can modify the value of the
>>> `sentence-end' variable (which is returned by the `sentence-end'
>>> function? The whole thing is a little confusing). You'd probably be best
>>> off starting with the docstring for the sentence-end function, and
>>> working back from there.
>>>
>>> I think the `sentence-end' variable is automatically buffer-local, which
>>> means if you change it in a mode-hook it ought to work the way you want.
>>> I agree that the whole syntax thing feels like a very well-polished
>>> hack.
>>>
>>> E
>>
>> Eric,
>>
>> Yes, that would be the variable to adjust. I took a hard look at it
>> and discussed it (I believe) on this list years ago, but never came up
>> with a fix. As I see it, there are two problems:
>>
>> First, "one" of the items in that RE would need to be "zero or more
>> consecutive instances of '<' followed by any number of other
>> characters up until the next '>' is found." E.g., the RE would need
>> to be able to find the end of this
>> sentence</b></i>.)</q></p></span></div> Though I've used REs
>> successfully in quite a few instances and so with a small bit of help
>> could probably figure that part out, there's a second issue.
>>
[In my original post the paragraph below was unclear. So changed it.]
>> My considered opinion is that in the above and similar examples, the
>> end of the sentence is immediately after the period ('.')... or
>> question mark, exclamation mark, etc. and not after the</div>. That
>> is where the point should go when forward-sentence is executed. This
>> means that no RE would work because, once it finds the RE-defined
>> sentence-end, it then needs to go backwards within the found string
>> until it encounters [.!?]+ and then move the mark one char forward to the
>> character after. IOW, unless I'm missing some capability of REs,
>> "sentence-end" needs to be a function rather than an RE and would be a
>> different function than one which finds the beginning of a sentence.
>
> I'm getting way out of my depth here, both regarding regexps and emacs'
> sentence-related shenanigans, but you could consider advising the
> `sentence-end' function so that it checks current the major mode, and
> delegates to a different sentence-end function depending on the mode (or
> declines to handle and bails to the built-in sentence-end).
>
> The individual mode-specific sentence-end functions look at the text
> after point, and return a different regexp every time, one specifically
> tailored to this particular sentence in this particular mode. The call to
> `forward-sentence' or whatever happily uses a different regexp every
> time it is called.
>
> Feels hacky, but I guess `sentence-end' is already doing this in a
> sense -- potentially returning a different regexp every time.
>
> My brain is exhausted!
>
> E
If one were to write a mode-specific replacement for the existing
"forward-sentence" and "sentence-end", what are some ways in elisp to
ensure that they're invoked when working in that mode? Would it be
enough to include (the recoded) "forward-sentence" and "sentence-end" in
the code for that mode...? or would some kind of specific hook language
need to be included in ~/.emacs?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-12-12 14:32 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-06-16 10:44 Understanding Word Boundaries Paul Drummond
2010-06-16 20:07 ` Karan Bathla
2010-06-17 13:37 ` Deniz Dogan
2010-06-23 9:02 ` Gary
2010-06-26 10:46 ` Paul Drummond
2010-06-26 10:53 ` Paul Drummond
2010-06-26 11:22 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen
2010-06-26 23:49 ` ken
2010-06-27 3:05 ` Deniz Dogan
2012-12-11 11:18 ` Understanding Word and Sentence Boundaries ken
2012-12-11 12:03 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2012-12-11 15:17 ` ken
2012-12-12 7:02 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2012-12-12 14:32 ` ken [this message]
2012-12-13 4:27 ` Finding end of sentence[ was Re: Understanding ... Sentence Boundaries] Eric Abrahamsen
2012-12-13 5:59 ` Eric Abrahamsen
[not found] ` <mailman.7.1277607983.30403.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2010-06-27 15:02 ` Understanding Word Boundaries Xah Lee
2012-12-11 2:11 ` Samuel Wales
[not found] ` <mailman.2.1277549613.3306.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2010-06-27 14:58 ` Xah Lee
2010-06-25 10:33 ` andreas.roehler
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