regexp BUG in multiple GUI text editing programs

[Adam Warner <lists@consulting.net.nz>]

Hi all,

I'm writing to you all together because you all suffer from the same
regexp bug. I suspect it could be caused by a library you all share? I
have only found that (X)Emacs doesn't suffer from it.

If you create a new file with these tags:

<test><test2>

Try and replace the tags with "hello" (no quotes) using this regexp:

<.*?>

[The "?" is supposed to make the any character matching non-greedy].

Here's what happens in various packages:

Bluefish pre0.7 HTML editor:
The whole of <test><test2> is incorrectly selected.

Kate 1.0 (using KDE 2.2):
The whole of <test><test2> is incorrectly selected.

gnp (gnotepad+ 1.3.1):
0 replacements found.

nedit version 5.1.1:
Very weird. If I replace the above string with "hello" (no quotes) the
output becomes:

hello<hello>hello<hello>

In all cases the end result should be:

hellohello

Only XEmacs is capable of generating the correct answer. I'm running an
up-to-date version of Debian unstable on x86.

I'm pretty new to regular expressions so I hope I haven't made an
elementary mistake (but I have XEmacs as my comparison :-)

I'm only subscribed to debian-user and debian-devel. Please only follow
up to the relevant groups or individuals.

Regards,
Adam