Re: Perl6ish rules in Perl5's regex engine

[audreyt]

in reply to Perl6ish rules in Perl5's regex engine

A regex fixpoint! That'll be insanely great for my nefarious purposes, such as Template::Extract, Template::Generate and friends. I've been pondering compiling Perl 6 rules to PCRE, taking advantage of its callback mechanism to implement nested capturing, but a fixpoint will elegantly provide this capability as well. :-)

[ysth]

Does that mean you volunteer to write the tests? :)

[robin]

I had the same idea a few years ago, and implemented it in PCRE. The author of PCRE reworked the implementation but kept the idea, and it's been a standard feature of PCRE since then. I still think it's very cool, but I don't know whether anyone actually uses it...

I didn't have the guts to try and do it for perl's regex engine. If you do it, it might be worth considering using the same syntax as PCRE?

[demerphq]

If you do it, it might be worth considering using the same syntax as PCRE?

Well, if it meant the patch was more likely to be applied then yes. OTOH, Im not super keen on using capturing buffers as the fix point. But im not totally against it either. I really need to look into PCRE more closely. How do they do named capture buffers?