Simon Willison’s Weblog

RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching. Google have open sourced RE2, the C++ regular expression library they developed for Google Code Search, Sawzall, Bigtable and other internal projects. Unlike PCRE it avoids the potential for exponential run time and unbounded stack usage and guarantees that searches complete in linear time, mainly by dropping support for back references.

# 12th March 2010, 9:28 am / russcox, google, regex, re2, open-source, c-plus-plus, pcre