boost_regex/doc/standards.qbk

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  Copyright 2006-2007 John Maddock.
  Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
  (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
  http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt).
]


[section:standards Standards Conformance]

[h4 C++]

Boost.Regex is intended to conform to the [tr1].

[h4 ECMAScript / JavaScript]

All of the ECMAScript regular expression syntax features are supported, except that:

The escape sequence \\u matches any upper case character (the same as \[\[:upper:\]\]) 
rather than a Unicode escape sequence; use \\x{DDDD} for Unicode escape sequences.

[h4 Perl]

Almost all Perl features are supported, except for:

(?{code}) 	Not implementable in a compiled strongly typed language.

(??{code}) 	Not implementable in a compiled strongly typed language.

(*VERB) The [@http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Special-Backtracking-Control-Verbs 
backtracking control verbs] are not recognised or implemented at this time.

In addition the following features behave slightly differently from Perl:

^ $ \Z  These recognise any line termination sequence, and not just \\n: see the Unicode requirements below.

[h4 POSIX]

All the POSIX basic and extended regular expression features are supported, 
except that:

No character collating names are recognized except those specified in the 
POSIX standard for the C locale, unless they are explicitly registered with the 
traits class.

Character equivalence classes ( \[\[\=a\=\]\] etc) are probably buggy except on Win32.  
Implementing this feature requires knowledge of the format of the string sort 
keys produced by the system; if you need this, and the default implementation 
doesn't work on your platform, then you will need to supply a custom traits class.

[h4 Unicode]

The following comments refer to 
[@http://unicode.org/reports/tr18/ Unicode Technical Standard #18: Unicode 
Regular Expressions version 11].

[table
[[Item][Feature][Support]]
[[1.1][Hex Notation][Yes: use \x{DDDD} to refer to code point UDDDD.]]
[[1.2][Character Properties][All the names listed under the General Category Property are supported.  Script names and Other Names are not currently supported.]]
[[1.3][Subtraction and Intersection][Indirectly support by forward-lookahead:

`(?=[[:X:]])[[:Y:]]`

Gives the intersection of character properties X and Y.

`(?![[:X:]])[[:Y:]]`

Gives everything in Y that is not in X (subtraction).]]
[[1.4][Simple Word Boundaries][Conforming: non-spacing marks are included in the set of word characters.]]
[[1.5][Caseless Matching][Supported, note that at this level, case transformations are 1:1, many to many case folding operations are not supported (for example "'''ß'''" to "SS").]]
[[1.6][Line Boundaries][Supported, except that "." matches only one character of "\\r\\n". Other than that word boundaries match correctly; including not matching in the middle of a "\\r\\n" sequence.]]
[[1.7][Code Points][Supported: provided you use the u32* algorithms, then UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are all treated as sequences of 32-bit code points.]]
[[2.1][Canonical Equivalence][Not supported: it is up to the user of the library to convert all text into the same canonical form as the regular expression.]]
[[2.2][Default Grapheme Clusters][Not supported.]]
[[2.3Default Word Boundaries][Not supported.]]
[[2.4][Default Loose Matches][Not Supported.]]
[[2.5][Named Properties][Supported: the expression "\[\[:name:\]\]" or \\N{name} matches the named character "name".]]
[[2.6][Wildcard properties][Not Supported.]]
[[3.1][Tailored Punctuation.][Not Supported.]]
[[3.2][Tailored Grapheme Clusters][Not Supported.]]
[[3.3][Tailored Word Boundaries.][Not Supported.]]
[[3.4][Tailored Loose Matches][Partial support: \[\[\=c\=\]\] matches characters with the same primary equivalence class as "c".]]
[[3.5][Tailored Ranges][Supported: \[a-b\] matches any character that collates in the range a to b, when the expression is constructed with the collate flag set.]]
[[3.6][Context Matches][Not Supported.]]
[[3.7][Incremental Matches][Supported: pass the flag `match_partial` to the regex algorithms.]]
[[3.8][Unicode Set Sharing][Not Supported.]]
[[3.9][Possible Match Sets][Not supported, however this information is used internally to optimise the matching of regular expressions, and return quickly if no match is possible.]]
[[3.10][Folded Matching][Partial Support:  It is possible to achieve a similar effect by using a custom regular expression traits class.]]
[[3.11][Custom Submatch Evaluation][Not Supported.]]
]
     
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