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Guide should fully document paths #706

@mcclure

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@mcclure

paths is pretty useful but the guide is very short. I had three documentation-related issues trying to use paths:

  1. There are no sample invocations in the guide. In my test program (twiggy instructions at end of Cargo.toml) I found the function names were long and complex, like <rand_chacha::chacha::ChaCha12Core as rand_core::block::BlockRngCore>::generate::h9a7082d79612fe9d. If I type that entire thing in as the function name, including the ::h9a708… part, paths works. But at first I did not realize the h9a7082d79612fe9d was part of the effective function name and was trying to search for things like generate or <rand_chacha::chacha::ChaCha12Core as rand_core::block::BlockRngCore>::generate.

    The guide shows the output of a search for wee_alloc::alloc_with_refill::hb32c1bbce9ebda8e, but does not show the invocation used to get the output. Just having seen the twiggy paths pkg/input.wasm wee_alloc::alloc_with_refill::hb32c1bbce9ebda8e sample invocation would have helped for me.

  2. The command line interface subsections (all of them) do not document arguments. I was trying to figure out if there was a way to search substrings or patterns, and it did not occur to me to look in the --help because I was looking at the web page and I assumed anything in the --help would also be in the web page. In fact --help contains information on arguments whereas the web page does not. I wound up searching the issues before discovering the invaluable --regex argument. Even a line saying "for information on arguments see twiggy paths --help" or whatever in the command sub-page would have at least kept me from tricking myself into thinking I had seen all the documentation.

  3. Neither --help nor the web page documents the definition of a regex from your program's perspective. For basic regexes this doesn't much matter, but many regex libraries/implementations differ in details or additional features. A link to the docs for whatever regex library you would be adequate.

🙌 Are you interested in implementing this feature?

Unfortunately not sure I understand the program well enough yet to write documentation… :)

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