search_src and friends are case-sensitive

[jhpalmieri]

The functions search_src, search_def, and search_src are case-sensitive and have been for a while. The documentation says that they're not. This patch changes the documentation to reflect this, and adds one doctest to verify it.

CC: @sagetrac-mvngu

Component: misc

Author: John Palmieri

Reviewer: Karl-Dieter Crisman

Merged: sage-4.2.1.alpha0

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/7320

[jhpalmieri]

Attachment: trac_7320-case-sensitive.patch.gz

[kcrisman]

Reviewer: Karl-Dieter Crisman

[kcrisman]

comment:2

Just out of curiosity, is it possible to change the behavior? Obviously that would be a different ticket. That could be useful (or not). Maybe a function that is, and another one that isn't...

The new patch is just making the notation for "case-sensitive" uniformly with hyphen, which seemed to be the majority of references in the doc; however, usage in general seems quite variable. One word for the adjective seems right, though. Maybe mvngu will have a comment, so I'm cc:ing him on this.

I also added a little to the doctests to make sure we're really doctesting the right thing and compare the two possibilities.

[kcrisman]

Fixes a few things, adds doctest - use this

[jhpalmieri]

comment:3

Attachment: trac_7320-case-sensitive.2.patch.gz

Replying to @kcrisman:

Just out of curiosity, is it possible to change the behavior? Obviously that would be a different ticket. That could be useful (or not). Maybe a function that is, and another one that isn't...

I think so: I think we can add a flag to the regular expression search to make it case-insensitive. We could add a flag (like ignore_case=False) to the search functions so people could toggle this. Of course, I haven't actually tried this, but the documentation for regular expression searches in Python suggests that it should be possible...

[sagetrac-mvngu]

comment:4

Replying to @kcrisman:

Maybe mvngu will have a comment, so I'm cc:ing him on this.

Sometimes I want to search the source with case-sensitivity on. For example, I might be interested in knowing if the source has anything with the word "Euler" in it. As function and method names are lower-case, case-sensitivity search might not return the name of a function/method like "euler_phi". However, if the documentation for "euler_phi" has something like "Euler phi function" or "Euler totient function", then case-sensitivity search would pick up "Euler". Sometimes I want to do a case-insensitivity search. In that case (pun not intended), I would expect that both "euler_phi" and "Euler" be returned by the search. At the end of the day, one can make case-insensitivity search as default, but should also give people the option to do case-sensitivity search. My 2-cent.

[mwhansen]

Merged: sage-4.2.1.alpha0