-x option does not work

[Johan]

Manpage says:
 Treat pattern as a (perl) regular expression. See perlreref(1) for details. Without this option, pattern is treated as a literal string to search for.

In Perl, the regular expression 'a|b|c' searches for a or b or c.

apt-get search -x 'a|b|c' does

Possibly related is this broken reimplementation of apt-file: https://github.com/dankamongmen/raptorial

Basic properties for | also fail:
apt-file search -x 'sbcl|gcc' gives different output from apt-file search -x 'gcc|sbcl'.

This issue can be solved in a couple of ways: 1) fix the program 2) fix the documentation 3) introduce a new program that works and is less tied to Perl hacks.