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Huh, PCRE is universal (almost, not in e.g. Emacs :-( ) and supports (almost) everything? Edit: Cough, after rechecking... PCRE is not as universal as I though

Huh, PCRE is universal (almost, not in e.g. Emacs :-( ) and supports (almost) everything? Edit: Cough, after rechecking... PCRE is not as universal as I thought. It seems I've been lucky. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_regular_expression_engines#Part_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_regular_expressio... Edit 2: "Atomic groups" on that wikipedia link is when you can write a full grammar in a large regexp, right? Answer myself: No, it is the name for stopping backtracking. I've seen it as named "possessive" (perldoc perlre).

collyw 12y ago
MySQL doesn't have them, it has some POSIX version, which is way less intuitive. Plenty of people use MySQL.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  Isn't that part of an SQL standard (1999?).
SiVal 12y ago
I thought it was becoming more universal, but now I'm not so sure. grep on the Mac used to use PCRE regexes if you used the -P option (`grep -P ....`), but beginning with OS X 10.8 the -P option was removed, so an important place that used to offer PCRE (default grep on a default Mac) actually removed support for it. They didn't replace it with something better; they just took it away. Maybe a Unicode issue? Not only is PCRE not universal, overall support might even be waning.