Re: [HACKERS] regular expressions from hell

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>

From: "Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>
To: Brett McCormick <brett@work.chicken.org>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@hub.org
Date: 1998-05-31T17:30:22Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
> I've noticed there are no less then 10^10 regex implementations.
> Is there a standard?  Does ANSI have a regexp standard, or is there
> a regex standard in the ANSI SQL spec?  What do we use?

afaik the only regex in ANSI SQL is that implemented for the LIKE
operator. Pretty pathetic: uses "%" for match-all and "_" for match-any
and that's it. Ingres had a bit more, with bracketed character ranges
also. None as rich as what we already have in the backend of Postgres.

Don't know about any other ANSI standards for regex, but I don't know
that there isn't one either...

                       - Tom