Intersystems REGEX engine
I am working on a product that uses REGEX and matches it.
The regex is tested both on the client-side (using the JavaScript REGEX engine) and both on the server-side.
But I couldn't find one word about the way intersystems parses the regex, It is quite elementary to state which which engine it works with.
from what I could gather from early implementations and such, the engine is based off PCRE, But I need to confirm this somehow, Can anyone give me a definitive answer, Is there any tool to test the regex other than writing it myself??
And just to clarify, YES - i found values that would test false in client but test true on server and vice versa, For the exact same regex, So obviously the engine is different..
* My goal is to be able to craft unified regex for both engines to avoid duplicate regex that required maintance...
Comments
The IRIS regex functionality is built on the ICU engine, which was based on (but does not rigorously adhere to) PCRE. This includes the ObjectScript $MATCH() and $LOCATE() functions as well as the %Regex.Matcher class. A web search turns up a handful of articles and posts discussing the differences between the two.
Python has a PCRE library (python-pcre) that may help if your development effort can be transitioned in whole or part to Python.
The Class Reference pages for IRIS, available in any IRIS installation, describe all the classes installed in the installation. The Class Reference for the %Regex.Matcher class documents that the %Regex.Matcher class comes from the International Components for Unicode (ICU). The ICU maintains web pages at https://icu.unicode.org . The class reference documentation also contains the following statement for ICU documentation specific to the IRIS %Regex:
{quote}The definition and features of the ICU regular expression package can be found in https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/strings/regexp.html .{quote}
Additional documentation on the Unicode Regex package specific to how it interacts with the Unicode character set can be found at https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/ .