Re: [HACKERS] regular expressions from hell

Roland B. Roberts, PhD writes:
> >>>>> "ocie" == ocie <ocie(at)paracel(dot)com> writes:
>
> ocie> I think most of this is due to different decisions on what
> ocie> needs to be escaped or not. For instance, if memory serves,
> ocie> GNU grep treats parens as metacharacters, which must be
> ocie> escaped with a backslash to match parens, while in Emacs,
> ocie> parens match parens and must be escaped to get their
> ocie> meta-character meaning. Things have gone too far to have
> ocie> one standard now I'm afraid.
>
> Please try to remember that there are historical reasons for some of
> this. grep and egrep behave differently with respect to parentheses;
> again, this is historical.
>
> Personally, I like Perl regexps. And there is a library for Tcl/Tk
> (nre) that implements the same syntax for that language. But I do
> like Emacs' syntax tables and character classes. I can live with
> switching back and forth to some extent....

Emacs! Huh! I like VI regexes... Uh oh, sorry, wrong flamewar.

Isn't there a POSIX regex? Perhaps we could consider that, unless of course
it is well and truly broken.

Secondly, I seem to remember a post here in this same thread that said
we already had regexes. Perhaps we should move on.

Seriously as part of a Perl extension to postgresql, perl regexes would
be the naturaly thing. But if we already have a regex package, I think
adding just perl regexes without perl, but requireing perl.so is uhmmm,
premature.

-dg

David Gould dg(at)illustra(dot)com 510.628.3783 or 510.305.9468
Informix Software (No, really) 300 Lakeside Drive Oakland, CA 94612
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