#13 Support grep's "-w" flag [PATCH]

[Anonymous]

Originally created by: dgryski

It's nice to be able to search for 'whole words', which is to say making sure the pattern has a word boundary at the beginning and end.

Having to type '\bpattern\b' is annoying, and grep/ack already have a -w flag which does this for you.
Since we already have -i which adjusts the pattern, I think adding another one isn't to terrible.

I've attached a patch that does this.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: dgryski

Blindly adding \b to the start and end of the pattern fails for cases where the pattern _already_ starts or ends on a word-boundary.

I've updated the patch with a better fix.  I've copied the implementation of regex.isWordByte() because we need to know what regex thinks is a word boundary.  An alternate fix would be to export this function directly from the package.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: dgryski

This patch only works for trivial cases, and making it work in the full case is Hard(er).

Full discussion on the patch set:

https://codereview.appspot.com/6162045/

I'm leaving this open for now, because it's still a nice feature.

Status: Accepted