FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2013 12:12:48 +0200
Frediano Ziglio <freddy77 AT gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't remember why I removed regex but probably was a portability
> issue. Windows for instance does not support regex. Also the bug
> "Having two kinds of REs is a botch." is not that great. I would
> personally use only extended syntax or even use PCRE
> (http://www.pcre.org/) library instead, it's very portable! And
> well.. Perl re are even much more powerful too! Using POSIX regex
> where available and another library on other systems could be a pain.

I think it was a portability issue.  I have a suggestion for a
replacement library, though.  No dependencies, and very nice
provenance:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/beautiful.html

and something like 30 lines of code.  I think it would serve our
purposes.  If not, I would suggest using Henry Spencer's library.  It's
in the public domain, and small enough to include with the FreeTDS
distribution.  I compiled it for windows quite easily once upon a
time.  

IMO PCRE is overkill for what we need.  

Regular expressions, by the way, can make for hours of facinating
reading. I particularly Russ Cox on the subject, 

        http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

in particular the first link 

        http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html. 

Regards, 

--jkl