Regex implementation that can handle machine-generated regex's: *non-backtracking*, O(n)?

Question

Edit 2: For a practical demonstration of why this remains important, look no further than stackoverflow\'s own regex-caused outage today (2016-07-2

Answer 1

If you can handle using unsafe code (and the licensing issue) you could take the implementation from this TRE windows port.

You might be able to use this directly with P/Invoke and explicit layout structs for the following:

typedef int regoff_t;
typedef struct {
  size_t re_nsub;  /* Number of parenthesized subexpressions. */
  void *value;     /* For internal use only. */
} regex_t;

typedef struct {
  regoff_t rm_so;
  regoff_t rm_eo;
} regmatch_t;


typedef enum {
  REG_OK = 0,       /* No error. */
  /* POSIX regcomp() return error codes.  (In the order listed in the
     standard.)  */
  REG_NOMATCH,      /* No match. */
  REG_BADPAT,       /* Invalid regexp. */
  REG_ECOLLATE,     /* Unknown collating element. */
  REG_ECTYPE,       /* Unknown character class name. */
  REG_EESCAPE,      /* Trailing backslash. */
  REG_ESUBREG,      /* Invalid back reference. */
  REG_EBRACK,       /* "[]" imbalance */
  REG_EPAREN,       /* "\(\)" or "()" imbalance */
  REG_EBRACE,       /* "\{\}" or "{}" imbalance */
  REG_BADBR,        /* Invalid content of {} */
  REG_ERANGE,       /* Invalid use of range operator */
  REG_ESPACE,       /* Out of memory.  */
  REG_BADRPT            /* Invalid use of repetition operators. */
} reg_errcode_t;

Then use the exports capable of handling strings with embedded nulls (with wide character support)

/* Versions with a maximum length argument and therefore the capability to
   handle null characters in the middle of the strings (not in POSIX.2). */
int regwncomp(regex_t *preg, const wchar_t *regex, size_t len, int cflags);

int regwnexec(const regex_t *preg, const wchar_t *string, size_t len,
      size_t nmatch, regmatch_t pmatch[], int eflags);

Alternatively wrap it via a C++/CLI solution for easier translation and more flexibility (I would certainly suggest this is sensible if you are comfortable with C++/CLI).