NAME

       re::engine::RE2 - RE2 regex engine

SYNOPSIS

           use re::engine::RE2;

           if ("Hello, world" =~ /Hello, (world)/) {
               print "Greetings, $1!";
           }

DESCRIPTION

       This module replaces perl's regex engine in a given lexical scope with RE2.

       RE2 is a primarily DFA based regexp engine from Google that is very fast at matching large
       amounts of text. However it does not support look behind and some other Perl regular
       expression features. See RE2's website <http://code.google.com/p/re2> for more
       information.

       Fallback to normal Perl regexp is implemented by this module. If RE2 is unable to compile
       a regexp it will use Perl instead, therefore features not implemented by RE2 don't
       suddenly stop working, they will just use Perl's regexp implementation.

METHODS

       To access extra functionality of RE2 methods can be called on a compiled regular
       expression (i.e. a "qr//").

       ·   "possible_match_range([length = 10])"

           Returns an array of two strings: where the expression will start matching and just
           after where it will finish matching. See RE2's documentation on PossibleMatchRange for
           further details.

           Example:

               my($min, $max) = qr/^(a|b)/->possible_match_range;
               is $min, 'a';
               is $max, 'c';'

       ·   "named_captures()"

           Returns a hash of the name captures and index.

           Example:

               my $named_captures = qr/(?P<a>\w+) (?P<d>\w+)/->named_captures;
               is $named_captures->{a}, 1;
               is $named_captures->{d}, 2;

       ·   "number_of_capture_groups()"

           Return number of capture groups

           Example:

               my $captures = qr/(Hello), (world)/->number_of_capture_groups;
               is $captures, 2;

PRAGMA OPTIONS

       Various options can be set by providing options to the "use" line. These will be pragma
       scoped.

       ·   "-max_mem => 1<<24"

           Configure RE2's memory limit.

       ·   "-strict => 1"

           Be strict, i.e. don't allow regexps that are not supported by RE2.

       ·   "-longest_match => 1"

           Match on the longest match in alternations. For example with this option set matching
           "abc" against "(a|abc)" will match "abc", without depending on order.

       ·   "-never_nl => 1"

           Never match a newline ("\n") even if the provided regexp contains it.

PERFORMANCE

       Performance is really the primary reason for using RE2, so here's some benchmarks. Like
       any benchmark take them with a pinch of salt.

   Simple matching
         my $foo = "foo bar baz";
         $foo =~ /foo/;
         $foo =~ /foox/;

       On this very simple match RE2 is actually slower:

                  Rate  re2   re
         re2  674634/s   -- -76%
         re  2765739/s 310%   --

   URL matching
       Matching "m{([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*)://([^ /]+)(/[^ ]*)?|([^ @]+)@([^ @]+)}" against a
       several KB file:

               Rate    re   re2
         re  35.2/s    --  -99%
         re2 2511/s 7037%    --

   Many alternatives
       Matching a string against a regexp with 17,576 alternatives ("aaa .. zzz").

       This uses trie matching on Perl (obviously RE2 does similar by default).

         $ perl misc/altern.pl
                 Rate   re  re2
         re   52631/s   -- -91%
         re2 554938/s 954%   --

NOTES

       ·   No support for "m//x"

           The "/x" modifier is not supported. (There's no particular reason for this, just RE2
           itself doesn't support it). Fallback to Perl regexp will happen automatically if "//x"
           is used.

       ·   "re2/dfa.cc:447: DFA out of memory: prog size xxx mem yyy"

           If you attempt to compile a really large regular expression you may get this error.
           RE2 has an internal limit on memory consumption for the DFA state tables. By default
           this is 8 MiB.

           If you need to increase this size then use the max_mem parameter:

             use re::engine::RE2 -max_mem => 8<<23; # 64MiB

       ·   How do I tell if RE2 will be used?

           See if your regexp is matching quickly or slowly ;).

           Alternatively normal OO concepts apply and you may examine the object returned by
           "qr//":

             use re::engine::RE2;

             ok qr/foo/->isa("re::engine::RE2");

             # Perl Regexp used instead
             ok not qr/(?<=foo)bar/->isa("re::engine::RE2");

           If you wish to force RE2, use the "-strict" option.

BUGS

       Known issues:

       ·   Unicode handling

           Currently the Unicode handling of re::engine::RE2 does not fully match Perl's
           behaviour.

           The UTF-8 flag of the regexp currently determines how the string is matched.  This is
           obviously broken, so will be fixed at some point.

       ·   Final newline matching differs to Perl

             "\n" =~ /$/

           The above is true in Perl, false in RE2. To work around the issue you can write
           "\n?\z" when you mean Perl's "$".

       Please report bugs or provide patches at <https://github.com/dgl/re-engine-RE2>.

AUTHORS

       David Leadbeater <dgl[at]dgl[dot]cx>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2010 David Leadbeater.

       Based on re::engine::PCRE:

       Copyright 2007 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.

       The original version was copyright 2006 Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org> and Yves Orton.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.

       (However the bundled copy of RE2 has a different copyright owner and is under a BSD-like
       license, see re2/LICENSE.)