Perl Compatible Regular Expressions for .NET
PCRE.NET is a .NET wrapper for the PCRE library. The goal of this project is to bring most of PCRE's features for use from .NET applications with as little overhead as possible.
The current version is 0.12.0, based on PCRE 10.34 (patched r1190). It targets .NET Standard 2.0 and supports the following systems:
- Windows x64
- Windows x86
- Linux x64
- macOS x64
The following regex operations are supported:
- NFA matching and substring extraction:
PcreRegex.MatchesPcreRegex.MatchPcreRegex.IsMatch
- Matched string replacement:
PcreRegex.Replace- Callbacks:
Func<PcreMatch, string> - Replacement strings with placeholders:
$n ${name} $& $_ $` $' $+
- Callbacks:
- String splitting on matches:
PcreRegex.Split- Captured groups are included in the result
- DFA matching:
regexInstance.Dfa.MatchesregexInstance.Dfa.Match
- Partial matching (when the subject is too short to match the pattern)
Library highlights:
- Works on the .NET Framework and on .NET Core (.NET Standard 2.0 target)
- Support for compiled patterns (x86/x64 JIT)
- Lazy evaluation whenever possible (for instance
PcreRegex.MatchesreturnsIEnumerable<PcreMatch>) - The API is similar to .NET's
System.Text.RegularExpressions - Callout support (numbered and string-based)
- Mark retrieval support
- Conversion from POSIX BRE, POSIX ERE and glob patterns (
PcreConvertclass) - Additional API for
ReadOnlySpan<char>matching, based onref structtypes
- Extract all words except those within parentheses:
var matches = PcreRegex.Matches("(foo) bar (baz) 42", @"\(\w+\)(*SKIP)(*FAIL)|\w+")
.Select(m => m.Value)
.ToList();
// result: "bar", "42"- Enclose a series of punctuation characters within angle brackets:
var result = PcreRegex.Replace("hello, world!!!", @"\p{P}+", "<$&>");
// result: "hello<,> world<!!!>"- Partial matching:
var regex = new PcreRegex(@"(?<=abc)123");
var match = regex.Match("xyzabc12", PcreMatchOptions.PartialSoft);
// result: match.IsPartialMatch == true- Validate a JSON string:
const string jsonPattern = @"
(?(DEFINE)
# An object is an unordered set of name/value pairs.
(?<object> \{
(?: (?&keyvalue) (?: , (?&keyvalue) )* )?
(?&ws) \} )
(?<keyvalue>
(?&ws) (?&string) (?&ws) : (?&value)
)
# An array is an ordered collection of values.
(?<array> \[
(?: (?&value) (?: , (?&value) )* )?
(?&ws) \] )
# A value can be a string in double quotes, or a number,
# or true or false or null, or an object or an array.
(?<value> (?&ws)
(?: (?&string) | (?&number) | (?&object) | (?&array) | true | false | null )
)
# A string is a sequence of zero or more Unicode characters,
# wrapped in double quotes, using backslash escapes.
(?<string>
"" (?: [^""\\\p{Cc}]++ | \\u[0-9A-Fa-f]{4} | \\ [""\\/bfnrt] )* ""
# \p{Cc} matches control characters
)
# A number is very much like a C or Java number, except that the octal
# and hexadecimal formats are not used.
(?<number>
-? (?: 0 | [1-9][0-9]* ) (?: \. [0-9]+ )? (?: [Ee] [-+]? [0-9]+ )?
)
# Whitespace
(?<ws> \s*+ )
)
\A (?&ws) (?&object) (?&ws) \z
";
var regex = new PcreRegex(jsonPattern, PcreOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace);
const string subject = @"{
""hello"": ""world"",
""numbers"": [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42],
""foo"": null,
""bar"": -2.42e+17,
""baz"": true
}";
var isValidJson = regex.IsMatch(subject);
// result: true- Include more tests from the PCRE test suite
- Documentation
- XML doc comments