I am not advocating for PCRE in particular, I just need a regex engine that is just as powerful. I guess re2 serves that purpose, although I haven't used it myself (knowingly).

Looking at https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/WhyRE2, re2 actually seems to be a good target. "match time is linear in the length of the input string", sounds like a really nice property.

On 5 Feb 2019, at 12:26, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz@gmail.com> wrote:

Please DON'T move to PCRE.
"Outside world standards"?  There are so many.
There are two important things to know about
PCRE: (1) it is a popular open source regexp
library for Perl-style regexps, (2) because of
that, it is prone to truly horrendous performance
problems.  There are alternatives, such as re2,
https://github.com/google/re2 ,
which are not subject to PCRE's intrinsic
performance pathologies.  As it happens, re2
supports *? +? and ??.

On Tue, 5 Feb 2019 at 20:34, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

Yes, Pharo regex implementation is very naive.
We will be moving to a PCRE binding to match outside world standards but we have not had the time to work on it :(

Esteban

> On 5 Feb 2019, at 00:27, Manuel Leuenberger <leuenberger@inf.unibe.ch> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I just noticed that the Pharo regexes do not understand non-greedy matches. A regex engine to be PCRE is kind of essential, not having '.*?' to be a parseable and working regex is a bummer. Are there any more powerful regex engines around for Pharo? I could not find any.
>
> Cheers,
> Manuel
>
>