Re: [MacPerl] how to prepare (mac) multi-line (text) file, thenmatch ...

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 10:56 +0000 8/11/97, Bart Lateur wrote:
>On Sun, 10 Aug 97 13:14:01 PDT, you wrote:
>
>>If I were approaching this, I'd start with the hard part, namely deciding
>>what makes a sentence.  If you are very lucky, then the rule might be to
>>consider that every period followed by two spaces and every question mark
>>or exclamation point followed by at least one space ends a sentence.
>
>Make that one space. And don't forget the case where a line ends with
>any of [\.!?]. Abbreviations might/will cause trouble.
>
>Anyway, if a line ends with another character, ignoring all trailing
>whitespace, then the sentence continues on the next line.

And then there are "proper quotations."  Wherein the period is followed by
the "

We've gotten out of that habit because we want to say things like

Now type "foo".

And not have the . be typed.
But in real English, the quote follows the . (or ! or ? or whatever).
(When your algorithm considers the immediately above chunk to be one
sentence, you're getting close.)  [Which was an example of a sentence
ending properly with .), whereas this one ends with something similar.]

   --John ("A preposition is a word you never end a sentence up with.")

--
John Baxter (Born before ENIAC, but not by much.)
   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA



***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch