Re: Pathological regexp match

On Jan 28, 2010, at 21:59 , Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> Michael Glaesemann wrote:
>> We came across a regexp that takes very much longer than expected.
>>
>> PostgreSQL 8.4.1 on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc  
>> (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-44), 64-bit
>>
>> SELECT 'ooo...' ~ $r$Z(Q)[^Q]*A.*?(\1)$r$; -- omitted for email  
>> brevity
>
> The ? after .* is pointless.

Interesting. I would expect that *? would be the non-greedy version of  
*, meaning match up to the first \1 (in this case the first Q  
following A), rather than as much as possible.

For example, in Perl:
$ perl -e " if ('oooZQoooAoooQooQooQooo' =~ /Z(Q)[^Q]*A.*(\1)/)  
{ print \$&; } else { print 'NO'; }" && echo
ZQoooAoooQooQooQ
$ perl -e " if ('oooZQoooAoooQooQooQooo' =~ /Z(Q)[^Q]*A.*?(\1)/)  
{ print \$&; } else { print 'NO'; }" && echo
ZQoooAoooQ

If I'm reading the docs right, Postgres does support non-greedy * as *?:

<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/functions-matching.html#POSIX-QUANTIFIERS-TABLE 
 >

However, as you point out, Postgres doesn't appear to take this into  
account:

postgres=# select regexp_replace('oooZQoooAoooQooQooQooo', $r$(Z(Q) 
[^Q]*A.*(\2))$r$, $s$X$s$);
  regexp_replace
----------------
  oooXooo
(1 row)

postgres=# select regexp_replace('oooZQoooAoooQooQooQooo', $r$(Z(Q) 
[^Q]*A.*?(\2))$r$, $s$X$s$);
  regexp_replace
----------------
  oooXooo
(1 row)

Michael Glaesemann
michael.glaesemann@myyearbook.com