According to the Boost.Regex Regular Expression Syntax, all the constructs you checked are supported. From Boost.Regex Standards Conformance, we learn that the unsupported Perl features are:
  1. \N{name} - but one can use [:name:]
  2. \pP and \PP
  3. (?imsx-imsx)
  4. Lookbehind
  5. (?{ }) and (??{ })
  6. (?(condition)yes-pattern) and (?(condition)yes-pattern|no-pattern)
That in my opinion isn't too bad. For point 1, there is an alternative, so no loss of functionality. Also note that one reason \N isn't supported is that \N isn't a regex construct - it's a string interpolation thing. PCRE doesn't support \N either.

I've written a lot of regexes, and seen even more, but I've never had the need to use the constructs of point 2, and I've never seen them used either. In PCRE support for \p and \P is limited, and only available if specially build with Unicode character property support. (PCRE does not have full UTF-8 support).

Point 3 might be a nuisance, but personally I've never used them to set flags for parts of the expressions - I only use them implicitely when interpolating a qr construct - a feature that can not be handled by a library. And with boost, you can set many flags when matching, even more flags than with Perl. Specifically, one can set flags that mimic /m and /s. (Or rather, one needs to set flags to turn the /m and /s behaviours off, if I understand the page correctly). /i can be achieved by first lowercasing what you are matching against. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to /x, but we were happy without it for years in Perl as well, and /x doesn't provide functionality - just readability.

Lookbehind in Perl regexes is fairly limited anyway, as you can only match against fixed width strings. Sure, it's a miss, but it's a miss of a limited thing.

Not being able to execute code isn't a limitation of the library - it's a limitation because it's a library. Only if regexes are an integral part of the language is such a thing possible, as it requires access to the variables. PCRE doesn't support (?{...}) and (??{...}) either, although it does have some other features that might do what you want to do with those coding constructs.

The last point is a miss because you can't use (?(?{...})yes|no), but then you are using code again, and that wouldn't be possible anyway due to the previous argument.

Note also that the last two points are still marked as highly experimental, and p5p reserves the right to remove or change them without any notice.

Note that I base this purely on what Boost and PCRE say about themselves on their web and manual pages. I've never used any of the libraries myself.

In reply to Re^3: Regex libraries by Anonymous Monk
in thread Regex libraries by Schuk

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