ptx <<< "012345678901234567890123456789🛠" SIGABRT

[oech3]

     /the release of **Rust Coreutils   0.3.0** — our latest milestone/
    /release of **Rust Coreutils 0.3.   0** — our latest milestone/
          0.3.0  |/ | Result        |   0.2.0 | 0.3.0 | Change 0.2.0 to
            |/ | Result        | 0.2.   0 | 0.3.0 | Change 0.2.0 to 0.3.0

thread 'main' (1463) panicked at src/uu/ptx/src/ptx.rs:505:5:
assertion failed: max_after_size >= after.len()
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

[oech3]

$ ptx <<< "We've got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠"
thread 'main' (59115) panicked at src/uu/ptx/src/ptx.rs:505:5:
assertion failed: max_after_size >= after.len()
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

[Xylphy]

I fixed the panic locally (root cause was mixing byte length via .len() with character-based slicing on UTF-8 input). The fix switches the relevant size checks to count characters instead of bytes, which prevents the assertion failure for multi-byte characters (e.g. emoji).

However, this surfaced a follow-up issue: even with the panic fixed, uutils ptx cannot perfectly match GNU ptx behavior in all cases due to fundamental differences between POSIX regex (byte/locale-based) and Rust’s Unicode-aware regex engine. In particular, word matching and width accounting can still diverge for non-ASCII input.

󰣇 coreutils/target/debug   main  $! ❯  ptx <<< "We've got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠"                                                                                    07:00 
                  We've got +11 more   G of 1.70. 🛠
                                       We've got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠
                               We've   got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠
                       We've got +11   more G of 1.70. 🛠
                We've got +11 more G   of 1.70. 🛠
                                 We'   ve got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠
󰣇 coreutils/target/debug   main  $! ❯  coreutils ptx <<< "We've got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠"                                                                          07:00 
             We've got +11 more G of   1.70. 🛠
                         We've got +   11 more G of 1.70. 🛠
          We've got +11 more G of 1.   70. 🛠
                  We've got +11 more   G of 1.70. 🛠
                                       We've got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠
                               We've   got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠
                       We've got +11   more G of 1.70. 🛠
                We've got +11 more G   of 1.70. 🛠
                                 We'   ve got +11 more G of 1.70. 🛠

Should I open a pull request for the fix of this issue or wait until there's a direction on whether we'll still follow GNU ptx?

[oech3]

Yes. We should fix panic at 1st. We cannot fix regex things soon (see rust-lang/regex#1126).

[ChrisDryden]

I know its not the ideal dependency to use but would using onig solve this problem?

[oech3]

or fancy-regex?