Subject: bug#64128: regexp parser zero-width assertion bugs

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2023 12:21:50 -0700

On 2023-06-19 11:34, Mattias Engdegård wrote:
> Here is a reduced patch that only fixes the really silly behaviour reported earlier, by making sure that `laststart` is reset correctly for all group A assertions. This should be uncontroversial.
> Maybe we should change group B assertions so that they work in the same way.

> -     operand.  Reset at the beginning of groups and alternatives.  */
> +     operand.  Reset at the beginning of groups and alternatives,
> +     and after zero-width assertions which should not be the target
> +     of any postfix repetition operators.  */

If I understand things correctly, this would cause "\b*c" to be treated 
like "\b\*c". If so, it's headed in the wrong direction.

It's long been documented that the only reason "*" is ordinary at the 
start of a regular expression or subexpression is "historical 
compatibility", and it's also long been documented that you shouldn't 
take advantage of this and you should backslash-escape the "*" anyway. 
In contrast, for constructs like \b* there is not a historical 
compatibility reason, so there's not a good argument for treating "*" as 
an ordinary character after "\b".

Instead, \b should not be a special case before "*", and \b* should be 
equivalent to \(\b\)* and should match only the empty string. Similarly 
for the other zero-width backslash escapes. This is what I would expect 
from these constructs from the longstanding documentation.

If we instead added a rule to say that a construct that can only match 
the empty string causes following "*" to ordinary, then \b* and \(\b\)* 
would both be equivalent to \*. Although consistent, this would be 
confusing: it would compound the historical-compatibility mistake. Let's 
keep things simple instead.

Also, whatever change we make to the behavior should be documented in 
the manual and in etc/NEWS.