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* Doc: remove src/backend/regex/re_syntax.n.Tom Lane2021-02-25
| | | | | | | | | | We aren't publishing this file as documentation, and it's been much more haphazardly maintained than the real docs in func.sgml, so let's just drop it. I think the only reason I included it in commit 7bcc6d98f was that the Berkeley-era sources had had a man page in this directory. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/4099447.1614186542@sss.pgh.pa.us
* Change regex \D and \W shorthands to always match newlines.Tom Lane2021-02-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Newline is certainly not a digit, nor a word character, so it is sensible that it should match these complemented character classes. Previously, \D and \W acted that way by default, but in newline-sensitive mode ('n' or 'p' flag) they did not match newlines. This behavior was previously forced because explicit complemented character classes don't match newlines in newline-sensitive mode; but as of the previous commit that implementation constraint no longer exists. It seems useful to change this because the primary real-world use for newline-sensitive mode seems to be to match the default behavior of other regex engines such as Perl and Javascript ... and their default behavior is that these match newlines. The old behavior can be kept by writing an explicit complemented character class, i.e. [^[:digit:]] or [^[:word:]]. (This means that \D and \W are not exactly equivalent to those strings, but they weren't anyway.) Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3220564.1613859619@sss.pgh.pa.us
* Allow complemented character class escapes within regex brackets.Tom Lane2021-02-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The complement-class escapes \D, \S, \W are now allowed within bracket expressions. There is no semantic difficulty with doing that, but the rather hokey macro-expansion-based implementation previously used here couldn't cope. Also, invent "word" as an allowed character class name, thus "\w" is now equivalent to "[[:word:]]" outside brackets, or "[:word:]" within brackets. POSIX allows such implementation-specific extensions, and the same name is used in e.g. bash. One surprising compatibility issue this raises is that constructs such as "[\w-_]" are now disallowed, as our documentation has always said they should be: character classes can't be endpoints of a range. Previously, because \w was just a macro for "[:alnum:]_", such a construct was read as "[[:alnum:]_-_]", so it was accepted so long as the character after "-" was numerically greater than or equal to "_". Some implementation cleanup along the way: * Remove the lexnest() hack, and in consequence clean up wordchrs() to not interact with the lexer. * Fix colorcomplement() to not be O(N^2) in the number of colors involved. * Get rid of useless-as-far-as-I-can-see calls of element() on single-character character element names in brackpart(). element() always maps these to the character itself, and things would be quite broken if it didn't --- should "[a]" match something different than "a" does? Besides, the shortcut path in brackpart() wasn't doing this anyway, making it even more inconsistent. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2845172.1613674385@sss.pgh.pa.us Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3220564.1613859619@sss.pgh.pa.us
* Implement lookbehind constraints in our regular-expression engine.Tom Lane2015-10-30
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A lookbehind constraint is like a lookahead constraint in that it consumes no text; but it checks for existence (or nonexistence) of a match *ending* at the current point in the string, rather than one *starting* at the current point. This is a long-requested feature since it exists in many other regex libraries, but Henry Spencer had never got around to implementing it in the code we use. Just making it work is actually pretty trivial; but naive copying of the logic for lookahead constraints leads to code that often spends O(N^2) time to scan an N-character string, because we have to run the match engine from string start to the current probe point each time the constraint is checked. In typical use-cases a lookbehind constraint will be written at the start of the regex and hence will need to be checked at every character --- so O(N^2) work overall. To fix that, I introduced a third copy of the core DFA matching loop, paralleling the existing longest() and shortest() loops. This version, matchuntil(), can suspend and resume matching given a couple of pointers' worth of storage space. So we need only run it across the string once, stopping at each interesting probe point and then resuming to advance to the next one. I also put in an optimization that simplifies one-character lookahead and lookbehind constraints, such as "(?=x)" or "(?<!\w)", into AHEAD and BEHIND constraints, which already existed in the engine. This avoids the overhead of the LACON machinery entirely for these rather common cases. The net result is that lookbehind constraints run a factor of three or so slower than Perl's for multi-character constraints, but faster than Perl's for one-character constraints ... and they work fine for variable-length constraints, which Perl gives up on entirely. So that's not bad from a competitive perspective, and there's room for further optimization if anyone cares. (In reality, raw scan rate across a large input string is probably not that big a deal for Postgres usage anyway; so I'm happy if it's linear.)
* Replace regular expression package with Henry Spencer's latest versionTom Lane2003-02-05
(extracted from Tcl 8.4.1 release, as Henry still hasn't got round to making it a separate library). This solves a performance problem for multibyte, as well as upgrading our regexp support to match recent Tcl and nearly match recent Perl.