PECOREGEX

Pecoregex stands for Perl-Compatible Regular Expression, better known as PCRE. Pecoregex is python-pcre's weird little cousin: like python-pcre, pecoregex acts as a bridge between Python and libpcre.

The key differences are:

• pecoregex relies on ctypes to load and leverage libpcre.so; consequently, it can be installed without compiling anything;

• pecoregex only provides access to the most essential features of libpcre: compiling and executing regexes (including retrieving captures); other features such as study(), JIT or sub() were not considered (yet?).

Modules

The pecoregex package provides multiple modules:

• pecoregex.pcre provides PCRE_* constants and the PCRELibrary class; this is the part that actually interacts with libpcre.so; it can be used directly or through the other modules that build upon it;

• pecoregex.document defines key names for the Pecoregex document format; Pecoregex documents are a way to bundle 1 to n PCRE patterns along with 0 to n subjects each.

• pecoregex.factory provides helpers to build common Pecoregex documents (e.g. "1 subject, n patterns" documents);

• pecoregex.util provides functions to process Pecoregex documents, i.e. compile the PCRE patterns they contain and match their associated subject strings against them;

• pecoregex.cli is typically invoked through the pecoregex CLI tool; it provides a mean to compile and execute PCRE patterns: patterns and subjects are provided either as command-line arguments or by passing a Pecoregex document on the standard input (as JSON or YAML); supported output formats include text, JSON and YAML; therefore, it is perfectly possible to compile and execute multiple PCRE patterns and subjects before picking up their captures using jq.

• pecoregex.extproc provides simple subprocess-based wrappers that leverage pecoregex.cli to compile and execute PCRE patterns in a separate process; this is meant for all those who consider calling C functions from Python as a threat to the reliability of their program.

License

This Python package and its modules are released under the 3-clause BSD license.