Re: [HACKERS] writing new regexp functions

On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, David Fetter wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 08:56:31PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >
> > All of SQL's pattern match operators have the pattern on the right,
> > so my advice is to stick with that and try not to think about Perl
> > ;-)
>
> Perl provides inspiration, but here, consistency would help more than
> orderly imitation of how it does what it does. And besides, when
> people really need Perl, they can pull it in as a PL :)

Alright, here is my code to date. I have put the pattern after the string
in the split function, as discussed above. The .tar.gz file expects to be
untarred in contrib/. I have made some regression tests that can be run
using 'make installcheck' as normal for contrib. I think they exercise
the corner cases in the code, but I may very well have missed some. It
requires the (previously submitted) attached patch to core to compile, as
it takes advantage of new exported functions from
src/backend/utils/adt/regexp.c.

Let me know if you see any bugs or issues with this code, and I am open to
suggestions for further regression tests ;)

Things that I still want to look into:
* regexp flags (a la regexp_replace).

* maybe make regexp_matches return setof whatever, if given a 'g' flag
return all matches in string.

* maybe a join function that works as an aggregate
SELECT join(',', col) FROM tbl
currently can be written as
SELECT array_to_string(ARRAY(SELECT col FROM tbl), ',')

--
It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set
foot.