Re: Glib Regex?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Derek Simkowiak <dereks@kd-dev.com> writes:

> 	I think regex-based searches are a feature that many applications
> would want, so I'm considering adding some kind of regex-based search to
> the GtkEtextBuffer API.  However, I don't want to do that unless there is
> a Glib wrapper for GNU regex.
> 
> 	So: Has this come up before?  Has any work been done?  Would there
> be a problem with adding regexes to Glib?  I might be willing to do it if
> people are interested.

Regular expressions have been proposed a number of times, and the decision
was made to use the PCRE library, so that we would have nice (perl-style)
regular expressions.

Scott Wimer (cc'ed) had a pretty-functional start at doing this

  (http://www.cgibuilder.com/code/g_regex/g_regex-1.0.1/src/)

but there were some issues about packaging that we never quite resolved.

Another thing is that it would really be nice to support Unicode - in
particular UTF-8 in whatever regular expressions we use. Perl 5.6 does
this quite nicely. However, converting PCRE to handle UTF-8 is a
moderately big job to do right, so this probably may not going to make
for GLib-1.4.

Regards,
                                        Owen