Tag table searching

Here's a bug: Go to the XEmacs source tree; make TAGS; M-x find-tag RET write-region-internal RET M-x find-tag RET write-region RET ;; it won't find it... Keep searching using M-x tags-loop-continue ;; will never find write-region find-tag-internal has this horrible code ;; \_ in the tagname is used to indicate a symbol boundary. (setq exact-tagname (format "\C-?\\_%s\\_\C-a\\|\\_%s\\_" tagname tagname)) (while (string-match "\\\\_" exact-tagname) (aset exact-tagname (1- (match-end 0)) ?b)) Huh? It's creating a string full of "\_", only to replace them with "\b"?? So the search string will end up being "\\bwrite-region\\b
\\|\\bwrite-region\\b" Huh???? Even if that was what we wanted, how is that pattern different from "\\bwrite-region\\b" ?? I feel this urge coming on to delete our version of etags.el. The FSF version couldn't be this bad..... Hmmm - OK, I retract that last remark... Here's what I want: First, look through all the tags tables for the STRING (not regexp) "^?write-region^A" That can't be too hard. It could even fit into the current framework if we regexp-quote "write-region". Then look through all the tags tables for the REGEXP "\_write-region\_". Now here's the tricky part - I want the syntax table to be used for the search to depend on the file being searched. So if we have in the TAGS table: lisp/code-files.el,1445 (defun insert-file-contentsinsert-file-contents
360,14517 (defvar write-region-pre-hookwrite-region-pre-hook
464,18379 (defvar write-region-post-hookwrite-region-post-hook
484,19203 (defun write-regionwrite-region
491,19492 Then I'd like the emacs-lisp-mode syntax table used for the tags found in code-files.el. OK, that might be hard. I'll live without THAT feature. Or I could live with the lesser feature of having special syntax support for C and elisp. Anyways, we look for "\_write-region\_", using some appropriate syntax table. Then we search all tags tables for the regexp "write-region". Maybe we should search somewhere along the way for the regexp "^?.*write-region.*^A" which will find substrings of exact matches. Kyle and Hrvoje, you've been maintaining this file. Christoph, you've wanted to replace our version with an improved one. And I will fix this if no one else is willing to. Who will do it? Warning: if I end up doing this, it might be a long detour. Oh, I should mention that I have (defconst tags-build-completion-table nil) Martin