How to restrict find-tag-regexp to search only the symbol part of TAGS

Question

A typical line in a TAGS file looks like this (note use of special characters ^? and ^A)

(defvar copyright-owner user-full-name^?copyright-owner^A213,7296

and a find-tag-regexp will search the entire line. But I want to restrict my searches to just the 2nd column, i.e. copyright-owner. In particular, for this example I want to avoid false positives for searches of user-full-name from finding this entry.

How can I restrict find-tag-regexp to just the matching part of the line and not the whole line?

Format defined in more detail here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags#Etags_2

Answer 1

ouch, it looks like find-tag explicitly only searches the first column and never looks at the tag itself. That's nasty.

From etags-tags-completion-table

  ;; This monster regexp matches an etags tag line.
  ;;   \1 is the string to match;
  ;;   \2 is not interesting;
  ;;   \3 is the guessed tag name; XXX guess should be better eg DEFUN
  ;;   \4 is not interesting;
  ;;   \5 is the explicitly-specified tag name.
  ;;   \6 is the line to start searching at;
  ;;   \7 is the char to start searching at.

To bypass this issue entirely, I now use etags-select.