Difference between revisions of "Talk:1638: Backslashes"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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(I don't think the regex is invalid)
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My - very wild - guess is that it was the command he used to find the line with the most special characters, but I am not confident enough to edit the article (if someone can confirm?).
 
My - very wild - guess is that it was the command he used to find the line with the most special characters, but I am not confident enough to edit the article (if someone can confirm?).
  
If it was supposed to do that, it doesn't work. Running it on my bash history matches no lines, and I have lots of special characters in there
+
If it was supposed to do that, it doesn't work. Running it on my bash history matches no lines, and I have lots of special characters in there [[Special:Contributions/197.234.242.243|197.234.242.243]] 07:12, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Revision as of 07:12, 3 February 2016

It should be noted that this also occurs in almost every programming language where "\" is the escape character. i.e.

print("Hello")
> Hello
print("\"Hello\"")
> "Hello"
print("\\Hello\\")
> \Hello\

Oh, and by the way, isn't this the third comic to mention "Ba'al, the Soul Eater"? Maybe we should start a category. (Others are 1246 (title text) and 1419.) 173.245.54.29 06:14, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't think the regex is invalid

According to man grep you need to specify the -E option to use extended regex; without it unescaped parentheses are not interpreted, so they don't need to match.

My - very wild - guess is that it was the command he used to find the line with the most special characters, but I am not confident enough to edit the article (if someone can confirm?).

If it was supposed to do that, it doesn't work. Running it on my bash history matches no lines, and I have lots of special characters in there 197.234.242.243 07:12, 3 February 2016 (UTC)