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.)
Some of the functions in regex compilation and execution recurse, and
therefore could in principle be driven to stack overflow. The Tcl crew
has seen this happen in practice in duptraverse(), though their fix was
to put in a hard-wired limit on the number of recursive levels, which is
not too appetizing --- fortunately, we have enough infrastructure to check
the actually available stack. Greg Stark has also seen it in other places
while fuzz testing on a machine with limited stack space. Let's put guards
in to prevent crashes in all these places.
Since the regex code would leak memory if we simply threw elog(ERROR),
we have to introduce an API that checks for stack depth without throwing
such an error. Fortunately that's not difficult.
Commit 9662143f0c added infrastructure to
allow regular-expression operations to be terminated early in the event
of SIGINT etc. However, fuzz testing by Greg Stark disclosed that there
are still cases where regex compilation could run for a long time without
noticing a cancel request. Specifically, the fixempties() phase never
adds new states, only new arcs, so it doesn't hit the cancel check I'd put
in newstate(). Add one to newarc() as well to cover that.
Some experimentation of my own found that regex execution could also run
for a long time despite a pending cancel. We'd put a high-level cancel
check into cdissect(), but there was none inside the core text-matching
routines longest() and shortest(). Ordinarily those inner loops are very
very fast ... but in the presence of lookahead constraints, not so much.
As a compromise, stick a cancel check into the stateset cache-miss
function, which is enough to guarantee a cancel check at least once per
lookahead constraint test.
Making this work required more attention to error handling throughout the
regex executor. Henry Spencer had apparently originally intended longest()
and shortest() to be incapable of incurring errors while running, so
neither they nor their subroutines had well-defined error reporting
behaviors. However, that was already broken by the lookahead constraint
feature, since lacon() can surely suffer an out-of-memory failure ---
which, in the code as it stood, might never be reported to the user at all,
but just silently be treated as a non-match of the lookahead constraint.
Normalize all that by inserting explicit error tests as needed. I took the
opportunity to add some more comments to the code, too.
Back-patch to all supported branches, like the previous patch.
The previous coding abused the first element of a cNFA state's arcs list
to hold a per-state flag bit, which was confusing, undocumented, and not
even particularly efficient. Get rid of that in favor of a separate
"stflags" vector. Since there's only one bit in use, I chose to allocate a
char per state; we could possibly replace this with a bitmap at some point,
but that would make accesses a little slower. It's already about 8X
smaller than before, so let's not get overly tense.
Also document the representation better than it was before, which is to say
not at all.
This patch is a byproduct of investigations towards extracting a "fixed
prefix" string from the compact-NFA representation of regex patterns.
Might need to back-patch it if we decide to back-patch that fix, but for
now it's just code cleanup so I'll just put it in HEAD.
Sync our regex code with upstream changes since last time we did this,
which was Tcl 8.5.0 (see commit df1e965e12).
There are no functional changes here; the main point is just to lay down
a commit-log marker that somebody has looked at this recently, and to do
what we can to keep the two codebases comparable.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
(extracted from Tcl 8.4.1 release, as Henry still hasn't got round to
making it a separate library). This solves a performance problem for
multibyte, as well as upgrading our regexp support to match recent Tcl
and nearly match recent Perl.