Regex match vs search

Some rules’ regular expressions are used with .search, some with .match, and the only source which one it is appears to be the gitlint source.

search: title-match-regex, body-match-regex match: author-valid-email, ignore-by-title, ignore-by-body, ignore-body-lines, ignore-by-author-name

I think it would be good to standardize on just one of these for all regex matching. I suggest going with .search, because .match is a Python oddity not present in any other language I know of. (It’s kind of ironic and unfortunate that the rules that have match in their name are the ones for which we do not invoke match, but search.)

Then again, standardizing on one would be a breaking change. If that’s not acceptable or will take some time, I think we should document which method is used with each rule. I’m available to help with that or making the search/match change (if we’re going with search 😉), let me know.

[jorisroovers]

Good catch, I agree with the suggestion to standardize on search.

Wrt deprecation strategy:

• I like the idea of a global feature flag to enable the new regex behavior (e.g. enable_regex_style_search=true, let me know if you have a better suggestion)
• We don’t have any case today where gitlint logs warnings. Should be easy enough though. To state perhaps the obvious, this should only be logged for users who are actually using these rules and the warning should disappear when the enable_regex_style_search flag is set.

[jorisroovers]

Released as part of 0.18.0, closing!