Subject: 26.1; ispell enchant support generates invalid regexp for empty extra chars
From: Daniel Pittman <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 02 May 2018 20:05:02 +0000
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

G'day.  With the new Enchant support in 26 I was motivated to try it out.
Turns out that some languages generate an empty "extra characters" report
for languages I use, which is turned into the (invalid, says `looking-at`)
regular expression "[]".

This triggers in this function in ispell.el:

(defun ispell--get-extra-word-characters (&optional lang)
   "Get the extra word characters for LANG as a character class.
If LANG is omitted, get the extra word characters for the default language."
   (concat "[" (string-trim-right (apply 'ispell--call-enchant-lsmod
                                         (append '("-word-chars") (if lang
`(,lang))))) "]"))

Obviously, when the result of that call is an empty string we get `[]`; in
my case:

] enchant-2-lsmod -word-chars en_US | xxd
00000000: 0a                                       .

...which causes that.  (Error is: `(invalid-regexp "Unmatched [ or [^")`)

I have attached a patch which correctly handles this case, though I feel
there must be a cleaner way to handle this modification of the return.

In any case, Google (and I personally) have papers on file with the FSF
covering this contribution, if it is non-trivial enough for that to matter.