12c9a04008
A lookbehind constraint is like a lookahead constraint in that it consumes no text; but it checks for existence (or nonexistence) of a match *ending* at the current point in the string, rather than one *starting* at the current point. This is a long-requested feature since it exists in many other regex libraries, but Henry Spencer had never got around to implementing it in the code we use. Just making it work is actually pretty trivial; but naive copying of the logic for lookahead constraints leads to code that often spends O(N^2) time to scan an N-character string, because we have to run the match engine from string start to the current probe point each time the constraint is checked. In typical use-cases a lookbehind constraint will be written at the start of the regex and hence will need to be checked at every character --- so O(N^2) work overall. To fix that, I introduced a third copy of the core DFA matching loop, paralleling the existing longest() and shortest() loops. This version, matchuntil(), can suspend and resume matching given a couple of pointers' worth of storage space. So we need only run it across the string once, stopping at each interesting probe point and then resuming to advance to the next one. I also put in an optimization that simplifies one-character lookahead and lookbehind constraints, such as "(?=x)" or "(?<!\w)", into AHEAD and BEHIND constraints, which already existed in the engine. This avoids the overhead of the LACON machinery entirely for these rather common cases. The net result is that lookbehind constraints run a factor of three or so slower than Perl's for multi-character constraints, but faster than Perl's for one-character constraints ... and they work fine for variable-length constraints, which Perl gives up on entirely. So that's not bad from a competitive perspective, and there's room for further optimization if anyone cares. (In reality, raw scan rate across a large input string is probably not that big a deal for Postgres usage anyway; so I'm happy if it's linear.)
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: http://www.postgresql.org/download See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at http://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.