seirdy.one/content/notes/regex-feature-creep-considered-non-harmful.md

title	date	replyURI	replyTitle	replyType	replyAuthor	replyAuthorURI	syndicatedCopies
Regex feature creep considered non-harmful	2023-08-26T15:00:22-07:00	https://akko.wtf/objects/14ffd986-060f-4bf9-9339-f26b1a3ecf5c	“regular” expressions	SocialMediaPosting	Chjara	https://tuxcrafting.online/	title url The Fediverse https://pleroma.envs.net/notice/AZ8TzJQpYkHFYzw0CO

De-facto standard extensions for recursion and variable-length look-arounds have existed for ages; the word "regular" in most regular-expression engines is there for historical reasons. I first read about this in {{}}{{}} by {{}}{{}} (he loves his biblical terminology).

I would like to just use Raku rules for a concise way to describe more advanced grammars; I'd then just keep my regexes to the PCRE subset that's common between Google's RE2 and the Rust regex crate. I doubt they're both "regular" but both guarantee linear time matching. Part of the reason I don't do this is portability. Not everything runs Raku, but almost every platform has a regex engine with the features I need.