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Extension of Regular Expression Character set

gemini_dk
2009-04-14
2012-11-13
  • gemini_dk

    gemini_dk - 2009-04-14

    Current Regular Expressions does not support many characters as in Perl regex engines. Could u pls keep this in mind for your future enhancements.
    ~N++ is the best~

     
    • cchris

      cchris - 2009-04-15

      N++ won't help you there.

      The control which does all the basic text editing and colouring, and also handles all searches, is the Scintilla control. This is another open source project hosted on Sourceforge. Notepad++ uses the Scintilla component, but is otherwise a completely independent project.

      Speed is critical for regex searches. I guess that any attempt of N++ at extending the regex abilities of Scintilla would be quite inefficient.

      Replacing the regex engine Scintilla uses wouldn't be much better, because accesses to raw text from the alternative engine into Scintilla internals would be quite inefficient as well. Or might break whenever Scintilla changes some hidden implementation detail.

      If many users start asking for  better regexes in the Scintilla forums or mailing lists, it will perhaps prod this project to upgrade. And then N++ could benefit from those in an efficient, stable way.

      CChris

       
      • Sune Marcher

        Sune Marcher - 2009-04-15

        Iirc I recently saw some notice about scintilla extended to allow raw access to it's text buffer, with the purpose of (for instance) allowing for more efficient regex searches.

        Might be worth looking into :)