How Regexes Work

How do Perl's regexes work on the inside? Suppose you were going to write a laguage like Perl, which has regexes, in a language like C, which doesn't? How might you do that?

• This article explains how it works.
• A sidebar explains the academic terminology that I didn't use in the article.
• This module, Regex.pm implements the scheme described in the article.
• This program, grep.pl implements a version of Unix grep in Perl without using Perl's built-in regexes.
• This program, demo.pl demonstrates that for some tasks, the Regex.pm library is a whole lot faster than Perl's builtin regexes.
• These diffs show how to add the . metacharacter to Regex.pm. We only need to add eight lines!

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