Notes about the WIN32 port of REGEX packages
Regular expressions are a neat way to describe and find patterns in strings. This functionality is often available only in specialized text editing or programming languages.
Finding no ready-packaged REGEX implementation for WIN32 environments the author located two popular implementations for Unix and ported them.
Either one of these libraries provides a POSIX style regular expression compilation and execution facility suitable for use with C and C++ programs.
- The Free Software Foundation gnu_regex.
- The Henry Spencer hs_regex as packaged with the FreeBSD libc.
In order to experiment with these packages I wrote a test_regex.c main driver, which can read input from the console or from a file. My impression is that both packages are reasonably efficient, although not as good as would be obtained with a fully optimized deterministic finite automaton , such as in Alan Bawden's code for the Zetalisp (MIT Lispmachine) READTABLE, or (I think) the Unix lex program.
Because of the pervasive/inductive copyright issue it is the hs_regex that I include with the windows compiled version of my winsiod scheme dialect of lisp interpreter.
Pointers to regular expression related material:
- A book from O'Reilly, called Mastering Regular Expressions.
- Amar Mukherjee.
- Content Model Algebra
- lexx in pascal
- A class project
This file is © Copyright 1997 by George J. Carrette.