Searching CPAN by regexps

[Irving Kimura]

I'm surprised that, given Perl's world-champion regular expression
engine, one can't use regular expressions to search CPAN. Is this
feature harder to implement than it looks?

If not, I'd love to take a stab at it. What are the channels?

Irv

 

[Sam Holden]

I'm surprised that, given Perl's world-champion regular expression
engine, one can't use regular expressions to search CPAN. Is this
feature harder to implement than it looks?

If not, I'd love to take a stab at it. What are the channels?

perldoc CPAN :

Searching for authors, bundles, distribution files and modules

...

Arguments you pass to these commands are either strings exactly
matching the identification string of an object or regular
expressions that are then matched case-insensitively against various
attributes of the objects. The parser recognizes a regular
expression only if you enclose it between two slashes.

 

[Irving Kimura]

perldoc CPAN :

Searching for authors, bundles, distribution files and modules

...

Arguments you pass to these commands are either strings exactly
matching the identification string of an object or regular
expressions that are then matched case-insensitively against various
attributes of the objects. The parser recognizes a regular
expression only if you enclose it between two slashes.

I am sorry, I was not at all clear. I was referring to the
search.cpan.org website, not to CPAN.pm.

(I'm aware that Andy Kobe's CPAN search site has limited support
for regexps, but nowhere near the full power of Perl regexps.)

I also found the proper channel to my query (search.cpan.org/feedback).

I'm sorry for the confusion.

Irv

--

 

[Irving Kimura]

perldoc CPAN :

Searching for authors, bundles, distribution files and modules

...

Arguments you pass to these commands are either strings exactly
matching the identification string of an object or regular
expressions that are then matched case-insensitively against various
attributes of the objects. The parser recognizes a regular
expression only if you enclose it between two slashes.

Actually, as I've just found even CPAN.pm's regexp support is
limited. For example, it doesn't recognize \W:

cpan> m /\Wedge/
Module id = SVG::Graph::Glyph::wedge
CPAN_USERID ALLENDAY (Allen Day <[email protected]>)
CPAN_VERSION undef
CPAN_FILE A/AL/ALLENDAY/SVG-Graph-0.01.tar.gz
INST_FILE (not installed)

(If Perl regexps were fully supported, the above command should
have returned

Module Image::Filter::Edge (B/BE/BEATNIK/Image-Filter-0.07.tar.gz)
Module Meta:rojects::Fortune::Edge (V/VE/VELTZER/Meta-0.08.tar.gz)
Module Meta:rojects::Md5::Edge (V/VE/VELTZER/Meta-0.08.tar.gz)
Module WordNet::Similarity::edge (S/SI/SID/WordNet-Similarity-0.06.tar.gz)

instead.)

I find this even more puzzling than the abscence of full regexp
support at search.cpan.org.

Irv

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