Alternate Regular Expressions Library

ruby-talk
1

A few weeks ago on the mailing list there was a small thread discussing
the fact that using Ruby for certain types of projects is made more
difficult due to the licensing restrictions of the LGPL which are
associated with the use of the regular expressions library. I recently
ran into a website which provides a Perl5 compatible regular expressions
library (www.pcre.org) with a much less restrictive license
(www.pcre.org/license.txt). Provided of course, that it tests out OK,
I’d like to suggest to the active Ruby developers, that this library be
used in the next major Ruby release instead of the current GNU library.
Alternatively, perhaps the Makefile could be configured in such a way
that a person building Ruby from the sources could easily select to build
and link with either the GNU or the PCRE regular expression library,
depending on his needs. Thanks.

Dennis

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2

Hi,

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In message “Alternate Regular Expressions Library” on 02/06/11, Dennis Newbold dennisn@pe.net writes:

I’d like to suggest to the active Ruby developers, that this library be
used in the next major Ruby release instead of the current GNU library.

Unofrtunately, PCRE does not satisfy all of my needs, for example
multibyte character handling. We already developed a new regex engine
for Ruby code-named “Oniguruma”. It will be used in the future
release of Ruby.

						matz.