This package provides Perl-Compatible RegularExpression
support in Go using libpcre or libpcre++.
The origin of this package is glenn-brown pcre but across other forks, this one has JIT compilation available, which makes it much faster. You can check out benchmarks game to see the difference.
| Go library | Time (lower is better) |
|---|---|
| This one | 3.85 seconds |
| mdellandrea (also glenn-brown fork) | 14.48 seconds |
| standard one | 27.87 seconds |
As you can see, this library is almost an order of magnitude faster than standard one and 3-4 times faster tahn pcre without JIT compilation.
API this library provides is a plain copy of C library API. Which may look really ugly to Go programmers. At least, it looks ugly to me, I don't think it's very convenient to set binary flags to use your regexp.
I want to refactor this library and make v2 version which will have API more like a standard library. If you are interested in such library, hit the star button. The more stars I see, the closer I am to implementing this idea.
Use godoc.
-
install
libpcre3-devorlibpcre++-dev -
go get
sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev
go get github.com/GRbit/go-pcre/Go programs that depend on this package should import this package as follows to allow automatic downloading:
import (
"github.com/GRbit/go-pcre/"
)Since this package use cgo it will build dynamically linked.
If you plan to use this everywhere without libpcre dependency,
you should build it statically linked. You can build your software
with the following options:
go build -ldflags="-extldflags=-static"More details on this here
Brief performance comparison across other Go libraries is in the beginning of the README, but if you are curious what regex library is the fastest here is an exhaustive research of the question: https://zherczeg.github.io/sljit/regex_perf.html
The answer is: it depends. But in most cases, it's RE2 or PCRE-JIT. RE2 tends to utilize multi-core systems better, while PCRE-JIT is better at using one CPU core for almost all use cases.
This is a fork of hobeone pcre, which is fork of mathpl pcre, which is a fork of glenn-brown pcre. The original package hasn't been updated for several years. But it is still being used in some software, despite its lack of JIT compiling, which gives huge speed-up to regexps. If you somehow can send a message to the original project owner, please inform him about this situation. Maybe he would like to transfer control over the repository to a maintainer who will have time to review pull requests.