regexp2 - full featured regular expressions for Go

Regexp2 is a feature-rich RegExp engine for Go. It doesn't have constant time guarantees like the built-in regexp package, but it allows backtracking and is compatible with Perl5 and .NET. You'll likely be better off with the RE2 engine from the regexp package and should only use this if you need to write very complex patterns or require compatibility with .NET.

Basis of the engine

The engine is ported from the .NET framework's System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex engine. That engine was open sourced in 2015 under the MIT license. There are some fundamental differences between .NET strings and Go strings that required a bit of borrowing from the Go framework regex engine as well. I cleaned up a couple of the dirtier bits during the port (regexcharclass.cs was terrible), but the parse tree, code emmitted, and therefore patterns matched should be identical.

Installing

This is a go-gettable library, so install is easy:

go get github.com/dlclark/regexp2/...

Usage

Usage is similar to the Go regexp package. Just like in regexp, you start by converting a regex into a state machine via the Compile or MustCompile methods. They ultimately do the same thing, but MustCompile will panic if the regex is invalid. You can then use the provided Regexp struct to find matches repeatedly. A Regexp struct is safe to use across goroutines.

re := regexp2.MustCompile(`Your pattern`, 0)
if isMatch, _ := re.MatchString(`Something to match`); isMatch {
    //do something
}

The only error that the *Match* methods should return is a Timeout if you set the re.MatchTimeout field. Any other error is a bug in the regexp2 package. If you need more details about capture groups in a match then use the FindStringMatch method, like so:

if m, _ := re.FindStringMatch(`Something to match`); m != nil {
    // the whole match is always group 0
    fmt.Printf("Group 0: %v\n", m.String())

    // you can get all the groups too
    gps := m.Groups()

    // a group can be captured multiple times, so each cap is separately addressable
    fmt.Printf("Group 1, first capture", gps[1].Captures[0].String())
    fmt.Printf("Group 1, second capture", gps[1].Captures[1].String())
}

Group 0 is embedded in the Match. Group 0 is an automatically-assigned group that encompasses the whole pattern. This means that m.String() is the same as m.Group.String() and m.Groups()[0].String()

The last capture is embedded in each group, so g.String() will return the same thing as g.Capture.String() and g.Captures[len(g.Captures)-1].String().

If you want to find multiple matches from a single input string you should use the FindNextMatch method. For example, to implement a function similar to regexp.FindAllString:

func regexp2FindAllString(re *regexp2.Regexp, s string) []string {
	var matches []string
	m, _ := re.FindStringMatch(s)
	for m != nil {
		matches = append(matches, m.String())
		m, _ = re.FindNextMatch(m)
	}
	return matches
}

FindNextMatch is optmized so that it re-uses the underlying string/rune slice.

The internals of regexp2 always operate on []rune so Index and Length data in a Match always reference a position in runes rather than bytes (even if the input was given as a string). This is a dramatic difference between regexp and regexp2. It's advisable to use the provided String() methods to avoid having to work with indices.

Compare regexp and regexp2

RE2 compatibility mode

The default behavior of regexp2 is to match the .NET regexp engine, however the RE2 option is provided to change the parsing to increase compatibility with RE2. Using the RE2 option when compiling a regexp will not take away any features, but will change the following behaviors:

• add support for named ascii character classes (e.g. [[:foo:]])
• add support for python-style capture groups (e.g. (P<name>re))
• change singleline behavior for $ to only match end of string (like RE2) (see #24)
• change the character classes \d \s and \w to match the same characters as RE2. NOTE: if you also use the ECMAScript option then this will change the \s character class to match ECMAScript instead of RE2. ECMAScript allows more whitespace characters in \s than RE2 (but still fewer than the the default behavior).
• allow character escape sequences to have defaults. For example, by default \_ isn't a known character escape and will fail to compile, but in RE2 mode it will match the literal character _

re := regexp2.MustCompile(`Your RE2-compatible pattern`, regexp2.RE2)
if isMatch, _ := re.MatchString(`Something to match`); isMatch {
    //do something
}

This feature is a work in progress and I'm open to ideas for more things to put here (maybe more relaxed character escaping rules?).

Catastrophic Backtracking and Timeouts

regexp2 supports features that can lead to catastrophic backtracking. Regexp.MatchTimeout can be set to to limit the impact of such behavior; the match will fail with an error after approximately MatchTimeout. No timeout checks are done by default.

Timeout checking is not free. The current timeout checking implementation starts a background worker that updates a clock value approximately once every 100 milliseconds. The matching code compares this value against the precomputed deadline for the match. The performance impact is as follows.

1. A match with a timeout runs almost as fast as a match without a timeout.
2. If any live matches have a timeout, there will be a background CPU load (~0.15% currently on a modern machine). This load will remain constant regardless of the number of matches done including matches done in parallel.
3. If no live matches are using a timeout, the background load will remain until the longest deadline (match timeout + the time when the match started) is reached. E.g., if you set a timeout of one minute the load will persist for approximately a minute even if the match finishes quickly.

See PR #58 for more details and alternatives considered.

Goroutine leak error

If you're using a library during unit tests (e.g. https://github.com/uber-go/goleak) that validates all goroutines are exited then you'll likely get an error if you or any of your dependencies use regex's with a MatchTimeout. To remedy the problem you'll need to tell the unit test to wait until the backgroup timeout goroutine is exited.

func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {
    defer goleak.VerifyNone(t)
    defer regexp2.StopTimeoutClock()

    // ... test
}

//or

func TestMain(m *testing.M) {
    // setup
    // ...

    // run 
    m.Run()

    //tear down
    regexp2.StopTimeoutClock()
    goleak.VerifyNone(t)
}

This will add ~100ms runtime to each test (or TestMain). If that's too much time you can set the clock cycle rate of the timeout goroutine in an init function in a test file. regexp2.SetTimeoutCheckPeriod isn't threadsafe so it must be setup before starting any regex's with Timeouts.

func init() {
	//speed up testing by making the timeout clock 1ms
	regexp2.SetTimeoutCheckPeriod(time.Millisecond)
}

ECMAScript compatibility mode

In this mode the engine provides compatibility with the regex engine described in the ECMAScript specification.

Additionally a Unicode mode is provided which allows parsing of \u{CodePoint} syntax that is only when both are provided.

Library features that I'm still working on

• Regex split

Potential bugs

I've run a battery of tests against regexp2 from various sources and found the debug output matches the .NET engine, but .NET and Go handle strings very differently. I've attempted to handle these differences, but most of my testing deals with basic ASCII with a little bit of multi-byte Unicode. There's a chance that there are bugs in the string handling related to character sets with supplementary Unicode chars. Right-to-Left support is coded, but not well tested either.

Find a bug?

I'm open to new issues and pull requests with tests if you find something odd!