Ere Maijala writes:
 > Robert Sanderson wrote:
 > > On Tue, 15 Aug 2006, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote:
 > > 
 > >>> 2.  Is it sufficiently useful to also allow negative numbers in the
 > >>>     start position?  eg:  -10:3 -- 3 characters starting at the 10th
 > >>>     from last.
 > >> Please, no. (That takes us several steps backwards -- if you allow negative
 > >> numbers you would also have to allow zero. I was liking the direction of
 > >> this discussion until this.)
 > > 
 > > Here's my use case:
 > > 
 > >   foo.fileName =/substring=-5 .html
 > > 
 > > Find all filenames that end in '.html', which can't otherwise be
 > > accomplished unless you can start a number of characters back from the
 > > end.
 > 
 > Shoot me for asking but what's wrong with plain old left truncation?
 > 
 > foo.fileName =/ *.html

Actually, I think that shooting myself for not having thoughts of that
would be more appropriate.  Would you like me to shoot Rob, too?

:-)

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/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <[log in to unmask]>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
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