Re: [PATCH 02/18] Change style of some regular expressions to make them clearer

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:
>
>>> -                       if (my ($child, $parents) = $line =~ m/^-?([a-f0-9]+) ([a-f0-9 ]+)/) {
>>> -                               foreach my $parent (split(' ', $parents)) {
>>> +                       if (my ($child, $parents) = $line =~ /^-?([a-f0-9]+) ([a-f0-9 ]+)/) {
>>> +                               foreach my $parent (split(/ /, $parents)) {
>>
>> This is a behavior-altering change. split(' ',...) is handled as a
>> special case[*1*] which strips leading whitespace and then splits on
>> /\s+/ (run of whitespace). Changing it to split(/ /,...) makes it
>> match only a single space (rather than a run of whitespace).
>
> I initially had the same reaction, but this is reading the output of
> the "rev-list --parents" command, whose fields are separated by one
> SP each, so there is indeed no behaviour change.

True. This potentially subtle point may deserve mention in the commit
message (or this particular change can be dropped).