Component separator regexp

The pattern components are space-separated by default: this is controlled by the variable ‘orderless-component-separator’, which should be set either to a regexp that matches the desired component separator, or to a function that takes a string and returns the list of components. The default value is a regexp matches a non-empty sequence of spaces. It may be useful to add hyphens or slashes (or both), to match symbols or file paths, respectively.

Even if you want to split on spaces you might want to be able to escape those spaces or to enclose space in double quotes (as in shell argument parsing). For backslash-escaped spaces set ‘orderless-component-separator’ to the function ‘orderless-escapable’; for shell-like double-quotable space, set it to the standard Emacs function ‘split-string-and-unquote’.

If you are implementing a command for which you know you want a different separator for the components, bind ‘orderless-component-separator’ in a ‘let’ form.