Re: Colon in index items

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Karl Berry wrote:

> 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).

Two problems:

  (a) The stand-alone Info doesn't use regular expressions to parse 
      references;

  (b) You could have more than one colon in a row (happens a lot in C++, 
      for example).

The possibility of parsing references from the end was raised in the past 
(IIRC).  It works better in some cases, but fails in others.