Re: Colon in index items

[Karl Berry]

BTW, can the Info readers resolve the problem simply by working
backwards to the last : instead of going forwards to the first :?
I feel like I must be missing something obvious or this would have been
done long ago.

For instance, consider this index entry from the autoconf manual, which
is currently misparsed by both Info and Emacs:
* @%:@:                                  Quadrigraphs.

A regular expression such as (egrep syntax for simplicity):
^\* (.*)( <[0-9]>*)?:[ \t]*(.*)\.$

will end up with \1 being @%:@ (the index entry name)
and \3 being Quadrigraphs (the node name).

Of course it won't work with a : in the node name, but that's already
disallowed for other reasons.

?

Thanks,
k