Re: regexkit [Using NSPredicate to parse strings]

FROM : Jens Alfke
DATE : Tue Mar 04 18:50:41 2008

On 4 Mar '08, at 3:25 AM, Jonathan Dann wrote:

> That is a seriously good framework, and the documentation is great 
> too.


My only issue with regexkit is that it uses PCRE instead of ICU.

PCRE has to be compiled into the library, making it larger (whereas 
ICU is already built into the OS.)

PCRE is also, last I checked, less I18N-savvy than ICU. This has given 
me grief in the past; I used PRCE-based regex code in a project 3 
years ago, and as soon as the Japanese and Korean testers started 
working with it, they found that the app's text searching didn't work 
correctly for them. (In a nutshell, PCRE's notion of "alphabetic 
characters" and "word breaks" only works for Roman writing systems.)

Unfortunately I don't know of a comparable Cocoa regex library that 
uses ICU. (NSPredicate does, but its support for regexes is very 
limited, as already discussed in this thread.)

—Jens