PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

[stvowi]

I've seen any implemations of the the "regular expression" - stuff in Free pascal which made me not happy.

How about it to implement regular expression such like in PHP only as fuctions on the base of the PCRE2-Library?

see:

• The PCRE Open Source Regex Library
• PCRE2
• Delphi Regular Expressions Classes
• PHP | Regular Expressions

[fibodevy]

What exactly is wrong with the regex support currently in FPC? "Made me not happy" doesn't tell me much - I'd need to know what's actually missing or broken.

If you could, post some code or pseudocode showing how you imagine it instead. Concrete examples of what you want to write, and what doesn't work today, would make it much easier to judge.

[stvowi]

I'm PHP Developer.
The object oriented implementation of the regular expression feature is to complex for may taste.
You have to write so much code.

[fibodevy]

I write PHP too, so I know the difference. But even if the syntax were simplified, you'd still need the regex unit in uses - it can't be built into the compiler itself, unless we want to double the size of every "do nothing" executable for no reason.

Rather than comparing to PHP/JS and other interpreted languages, it's more useful to look at what natively compiled languages do. Go has the regexp package, Rust has the regex crate, C++ has <regex> - in all of them you import/include a library first. None of them bake it into the language.

[stvowi]

Sorry, I have no code snippets in my brain. I would like prefer fuctions/ procedures for the work with regular expressions.

[stvowi]

Maybe you can offer an wrapper/ bindings around PRCE2-library. I haven't fount a actual wrapper.
There are much old stuff in free pascal.
You haven't it deep intigrate in the language.

[stvowi]

Maybe you know someone who can do this work for you.

[stvowi]

I have found PCRE24Delphi.

@see; Pascal (Delphi / Free Pascal) bindings for PCRE2

Could you please pre-install this package as standard?

[stvowi]

....under packages

[fibodevy]

No - too many dependencies. On Windows you'd have to ship your application together with 4 DLL files. That's not something I want to force on every project by default.

It's a package - anyone who needs PCRE2 can add it themselves.

[stvowi]

If we can assume that Unleashed Pascal provides bindings for PCRE2, then we can build a helper unit that simulates PHP’s PCRE functions for UTF-8 strings.

The helper unit is useful if you want to transpile PHP code into Unleashed Pascal Code using an AI model.

That's one of my dreams: Free PHP to Pascal Converter

[stvowi]

Thanks for the hint!
Have a nice day!