[pmwiki-users] attachlist syntax or attach rendering

[Neil Herber]

At 2005-07-29  12:56 PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
>I'm generally in favor of wildcarding, and it's been discussed
>before in the context of the (:attachlist:) markup when the ext=
>option was introduced.  I think being able to write something
>like (:attachlist name=foo*.txt:) makes perfect sense.
>
>However, one concern I have (and the reason I haven't implemented
>this yet) is the confusion that wikiadmins are likely to experience
>from having a system that uses wildcards and regular expressions --
>knowing the differences between the two, and when to use a wildcard
>versus a regular expression.
>
>Any thoughts...?

Speaking as a member of the great unwashed masses who know very close to 
nothing about regular expressions, wildcards make perfect sense. Even 
Windoze users know about them if they have ever had the pleasure of typing 
"del *.*" at the command line prompt or if they have noted the "*.*" 
wildcard string that appears in some file open dialogs even under XP.

As Chris Cox mentioned in his post, for directory related things, wildcards 
seem the natural choice.

By contrast, REs are so arcane I have no difficulty deciding when to use 
them - almost never! ;-)


Neil

Neil Herber
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