Talk:Comparison of regular expression engines

Ill-defined terms

Too many of the terms used as headings are vague or apply only to the terminology used for one RE engine. What this article really needs is a glossary of its terms.

There's also a fair point to be made that many of the tables here could be prose, and that would facilitate citing them. -Harmil 19:47, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree a terminology description would be useful. However I strongly disagree some of the tables should be converted to text. First because that takes away this articles main feature - the ability to see differences within seconds without reading for hours - and secondly citing Wikipedia is discouraged anyway. // Sping 17:20, 11 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Care to give examples of terminology you consider too vague or applicable only to "the terminology used for one RE engine?" (I'm not really sure what you mean by that.) I think the terms are fairly straightforward. IMO, a bigger problem is that a very large number of significant features supported by some regex libraries are not currently represented in the comparison tables here. --Monger 04:03, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What on earth is a "Lazy Quantifier"? I can't find mention of it anywhere else. 72.220.174.159 20:24, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- You must not have looked very far. In the content of regular expression quantifiers, lazy is the opposite of greedy. See http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html for more info. I've also seen lazy quantifiers described as "non-greedy" or "reluctant". --Monger 01:17, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  - Lazy is not the opposite of greedy, that is a poor name. Also, I've never seen it called "lazy" before, non-greedy is the standard term.mathrick (talk) 23:42, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Removing flavors with no information

Unless others disagree, I plan to remove from the comparison tables any flavors and engines which currently have no information about their features listed. Currently, this includes the following:

ActionScript3.0
Boost.Xpressive
Grep
GRETA
Jakarta/Regexp
Oniguruma
SubEthaEdit
Tcl 8.1
TextMate

I would encourage others to list information about these engines' features, especially since a few of them are very significant and commonly used. However, I do not see any value in listing them without any information (none include any more than a couple "no"s). --Monger 00:54, 17 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone ahead and done this. --Monger 01:00, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unicode property support

I have not found any evidence, that Python supports unicode properties (like \p{L}). I'm not sure how it is about another implementations, so I am fixing only the Python item. See e.g. [1]. Mykhal (talk) 21:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]