Being replaced by kddnewton/exreg.

A regular expression engine written in Ruby.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "regular_expression"

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install regular_expression

One of the backends that the regular expression compiler can use is cranelift, which is a rust project with Ruby bindings handled by the cranelift_ruby gem. In order to use the compiler, you'll need to have cargo installed so that it can compile the rust native extension. On a Mac or Linux you can curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh. For other platforms, searching install cargo can tell you how. Additionally, you'll need your Ruby to have been compiled with the --enable-shared option.

To call #disasm on the generated machine code, you'll need Capstone installed. On a Mac you can brew install capstone, or on Ubuntu you can sudo apt-get install libcapstone-dev. For other platforms, searching install capstone can tell you how.

To call #to_dot on the syntax tree or the state machines, or run the tests, you'll need Graphviz installed. On a Mac you can brew install graphviz, or on Ubuntu you can sudo apt-get install graphviz. For other platforms, searching install graphviz can tell you how.

To create a regular expression pattern, use:

pattern = RegularExpression::Pattern.new("ab?c")

Patterns can be queried for whether or not they match a test string, as in:

pattern.match?("abc") # => true
pattern.match?("ac") # => true
pattern.match?("ab") # => false

After installing the dependencies checking out the repo, run bundle install to install dependencies. Then, run bundle exec rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

At the moment we support most basic features, but there is a lot of ground left to cover. Some of them are written out in issues, while others are just documented here. Here is the current list as it stands:

To benchmark the current performance on your current version of Ruby, run:

$ bundle exec rake benchmark

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kddnewton/regular_expression. For information about how to contribute to the development of this gem, see the CONTRIBUTING.md document.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.