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Regex API

This API provides PCRE regular expressions for those who needs more power in matching text. This API written in C and Lua.

Creating a regex

Use regex.compile(pattern, options) to compile a regex.

• pattern: The regex pattern
• options: regex modifiers as a string, eg "im"
  • "i": Case-insensitive search
  • "m": Multiline search
  • "s": Match all characters with dot (.), including newlines.

Matching

Low level functions

• regex:cmatch(str, offset, options) low-level matching function
  • str: The string to match against
  • offset: Where to start matching
  • options: A bit field of options
  • regex.ANCHORED: Only match from the start of the string
  • regex.ENDANCHORED: Only match from the end of the string
  • regex.NOTBOL: String is not beginning of line
  • regex.NOTEOL: String is not the end of line
  • regex.NOTEMPTY: Do not match an empty string
  • regex.NOTEMPTY_ATSTART: Do not match empty string at the start

Note: regex:cmatch() returns wrong indexes (currently at version 2.0.2). The end index returned by regex:cmatch() is always off by 1 (-1 to get the actual end index).

High level functions

All the functions below can be in 2 forms: - regex:fn(...) where regex is the compiled regex instance - regex.fn(pattern, ...) where pattern is a pattern string to be compiled and used directly.

We will only document the first form.

• regex:match(str, offset, options) high level matching function. This function accepts the same arguments as regex:cmatch()
• regex:gsub(str, replacement) replaces matches in str with replacement. Capture groups are identified with \0 to \9, this might change in the future.