I have written a new regular expression library, supporting full
Perl-style regular expressions, with just a couple of qualifications. It
seemed easier to do this than to try to extend the Spencer code further
or to extricate the code from within Perl.
The new code will be used in Exim, but I'll also release it standalone.
Meanwhile, it would be nice if some people other than me could test it
and/or comment on the code, the documentation, the interface, etc.
Testing doesn't necessarily mean writing code, because it comes with its
own test program to which you can throw regular expressions and data to
be matched against them. There is a file of test data and the output it
should produce in the distribution. This includes the "monster" regexps
from "Mastering Regular Expressions", but if anyone would care to
contribute any other exciting tests, please do so.
I have put a distribution in
ftp://ftp.cus.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programs/exim/Testing/pcre-0.90.tar.gz
for the moment. Once it is released properly, I'll put it in its own
directory (though it will also eventually be included in the Exim
distribution, of course). The code is a lot bigger than the Spencer
functions, not unexpectedly, but the compiled regexps are smaller and on
the whole run faster. Some simple test results are recorded in a file
called Performance.
Comments, suggestions, bug reports. etc. are invited...
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
--
* This is sent by the exim-users mailing list. To unsubscribe send a
mail with subject "unsubscribe" to exim-users-request@???
* Exim information can be found at http://www.exim.org/
