Bug in XPL Parse wild-x

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

I discovered a bad bug (what's a good bug ;-) ) in 4.016's use of wildcards
in the parse string for XPL programs, when I was considering Charles
Herold's query:

>Is there any way of pulling a substring from a string in XPL by an
>offset, rather than using the XS command. That is, if I have the string
>"hello there", could I get the "there" into it's own variable just by
>knowing that the 't' is offset in by 7 characters? In this particular
>case I could use XS to divide the string into what is before and after
>the space, but I want to do something far more involved (which I won't
>waste your time with).

> Basically I want the equivalant of Basic's MID$.

You are supposed to be able to use wildcards in the parse string, as Joe
Solla suggested. But testing it out shows it DOESN'T WORK. At least not in
4.016. x doesn't recognize spaces! This is a terrible bug.

Can others try it? Try this one:
xx>
--where  is the escape character, which appears in 4.016 as a
left-pointing arrow, and BF is the pfunc for bottom-file.

When I run that, I get no content in 03,04, or 05.

But if you change the string from "a c" to "abc" you get the expected results:
03 has nothing, 04 has "ab" and 05 has "c"!

Regards,

  Harry Binswanger
  hb@xxxxxxxx