Re: Ugly regexps

[Stefan Kangas]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> While we're at it, has it ever been discussed to add support for the
> pcre library side-by-side with our homegrown regexp.c?  It would give us
> sane (standard) syntax and some useful features "for free"
> (e.g. lookaround).  I didn't test but a priori I would also assume the
> code to be much more performant than anything we could ever cook up
> ourselves.  It is used by several high-profile projects.

Of course this had already been discussed.  I found this interesting
thread from 2012:

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-01/msg00736.html

Long story short, it may be a non-trivial job.  In particular supporting
the \s and \c operators seems like a hard nut to crack.