It depends on your requirements. You didn't state them explicitly but presumably performance is more important to you than portability and features. PCRE is much more portable than boost, is very widely used in high profile products (PHP, Python, Apache, ...), indeed it's a de facto standard.

One possibility is to support both boost and PCRE. As for resources required to add PCRE, I added PCRE to our cross-platform library (11 different platforms) in, oh, a day or so. It is ANSI C and built and ran fine on all 11 platforms with no problems. Compare that to stlport which has been a portability nightmare for us, taking months of effort. Now, boost is a fine library, written by ANSI C++ experts ... but are they regex experts?

Out of curiosity, which compilers/platforms are you currently supporting with boost?

Update:

As I was testing this thing I found some limitations: Lookaheads, controlling greedy quantifier, ...

I've never used the boost regex library but am keenly interested in it and just took a look at its doco, which states that it supports both perl5-style lookahead assertions (see "Forward Lookahead Asserts" section) and non-greedy quantifiers (see "Non-greedy repeats" section). Can you give more details of the problems you were having with these?


In reply to Re: Regex libraries by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Regex libraries by Schuk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.