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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-19 00:47:55 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-19 00:47:55 +0000
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Adding upstream version 124.0.1.upstream/124.0.1
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
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+C API for RUst's REgex engine
+=============================
+rure is a C API to Rust's regex library, which guarantees linear time
+searching using finite automata. In exchange, it must give up some common
+regex features such as backreferences and arbitrary lookaround. It does
+however include capturing groups, lazy matching, Unicode support and word
+boundary assertions. Its matching semantics generally correspond to Perl's,
+or "leftmost first." Namely, the match locations reported correspond to the
+first match that would be found by a backtracking engine.
+
+The header file (`includes/rure.h`) serves as the primary API documentation of
+this library. Types and flags are documented first, and functions follow.
+
+The syntax and possibly other useful things are documented in the Rust
+API documentation: https://docs.rs/regex
+
+
+Examples
+--------
+There are readable examples in the `ctest` and `examples` sub-directories.
+
+Assuming you have
+[Rust and Cargo installed](https://www.rust-lang.org/downloads.html)
+(and a C compiler), then this should work to run the `iter` example:
+
+```
+$ git clone git://github.com/rust-lang/regex
+$ cd regex/regex-capi/examples
+$ ./compile
+$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../target/release ./iter
+```
+
+
+Performance
+-----------
+It's fast. Its core matching engine is a lazy DFA, which is what GNU grep
+and RE2 use. Like GNU grep, this regex engine can detect multi byte literals
+in the regex and will use fast literal string searching to quickly skip
+through the input to find possible match locations.
+
+All memory usage is bounded and all searching takes linear time with respect
+to the input string.
+
+For more details, see the PERFORMANCE guide:
+https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/blob/master/PERFORMANCE.md
+
+
+Text encoding
+-------------
+All regular expressions must be valid UTF-8.
+
+The text encoding of haystacks is more complicated. To a first
+approximation, haystacks should be UTF-8. In fact, UTF-8 (and, one
+supposes, ASCII) is the only well defined text encoding supported by this
+library. It is impossible to match UTF-16, UTF-32 or any other encoding
+without first transcoding it to UTF-8.
+
+With that said, haystacks do not need to be valid UTF-8, and if they aren't
+valid UTF-8, no performance penalty is paid. Whether invalid UTF-8 is
+matched or not depends on the regular expression. For example, with the
+`RURE_FLAG_UNICODE` flag enabled, the regex `.` is guaranteed to match a
+single UTF-8 encoding of a Unicode codepoint (sans LF). In particular,
+it will not match invalid UTF-8 such as `\xFF`, nor will it match surrogate
+codepoints or "alternate" (i.e., non-minimal) encodings of codepoints.
+However, with the `RURE_FLAG_UNICODE` flag disabled, the regex `.` will match
+any *single* arbitrary byte (sans LF), including `\xFF`.
+
+This provides a useful invariant: wherever `RURE_FLAG_UNICODE` is set, the
+corresponding regex is guaranteed to match valid UTF-8. Invalid UTF-8 will
+always prevent a match from happening when the flag is set. Since flags can be
+toggled in the regular expression itself, this allows one to pick and choose
+which parts of the regular expression must match UTF-8 or not.
+
+Some good advice is to always enable the `RURE_FLAG_UNICODE` flag (which is
+enabled when using `rure_compile_must`) and selectively disable the flag when
+one wants to match arbitrary bytes. The flag can be disabled in a regular
+expression with `(?-u)`.
+
+Finally, if one wants to match specific invalid UTF-8 bytes, then you can
+use escape sequences. e.g., `(?-u)\\xFF` will match `\xFF`. It's not
+possible to use C literal escape sequences in this case since regular
+expressions must be valid UTF-8.
+
+
+Aborts
+------
+This library will abort your process if an unwinding panic is caught in the
+Rust code. Generally, a panic occurs when there is a bug in the program or
+if allocation failed. It is possible to cause this behavior by passing
+invalid inputs to some functions. For example, giving an invalid capture
+group index to `rure_captures_at` will cause Rust's bounds checks to fail,
+which will cause a panic, which will be caught and printed to stderr. The
+process will then `abort`.
+
+
+Missing
+-------
+There are a few things missing from the C API that are present in the Rust API.
+There's no particular (known) reason why they don't, they just haven't been
+implemented yet.
+
+* Splitting a string by a regex.
+* Replacing regex matches in a string with some other text.