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<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><i>> > cut Last 5 15
> Oh, I wasn't aware that this variant of the cut command exists at all. Where did you find it?</i>
It's mentioned on page 19 in the CQP tutorial (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://cwb.sourceforge.net/files/CQP_Tutorial.pdf">http://cwb.sourceforge.net/files/CQP_Tutorial.pdf</a>).
<i>
> My suggestion would be to
> 1) disallow negative values for <A> and <B> as indices from the end – or does anybody actually use them?</i>
As far as I can tell the current implementation of negative indices is broken:
if (first < 0) first = n_matches - first;
if (last < 0) last = n_matches - last;
Since first/last are negative numbers, the subtractions above result in additions, so index -3 in a query with 10 results actually translates to index 13, leading to an error. I guess that means you can safely assume no one has been using the negative indices.
<i>> 2) clamp the specified range to the query size, possibly issuing a warning if start or end are out of range</i>
Sounds good to me, as long as it also means that we get an empty result when both start and end are out of range (just like with 'cat').
Martin
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