An ancient logic error in cfindloop() could cause the regex engine to fail
to find matches that begin later than the start of the string. This
function is only used when the regex pattern contains a back reference,
and so far as we can tell the error is only reachable if the pattern is
non-greedy (i.e. its first quantifier uses the ? modifier). Furthermore,
the actual match must begin after some potential match that satisfies the
DFA but then fails the back-reference's match test.
Reported and fixed by Jeevan Chalke, with cosmetic adjustments by me.
The syntax "\n*", that is a backref with a * quantifier directly applied
to it, has never worked correctly in Spencer's library. This has been an
open bug in the Tcl bug tracker since 2005:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1115587&group_id=10894&atid=110894
The core of the problem is in parseqatom(), which first changes "\n*" to
"\n+|" and then applies repeat() to the NFA representing the backref atom.
repeat() thinks that any arc leading into its "rp" argument is part of the
sub-NFA to be repeated. Unfortunately, since parseqatom() already created
the arc that was intended to represent the empty bypass around "\n+", this
arc gets moved too, so that it now leads into the state loop created by
repeat(). Thus, what was supposed to be an "empty" bypass gets turned into
something that represents zero or more repetitions of the NFA representing
the backref atom. In the original example, in place of
^([bc])\1*$
we now have something that acts like
^([bc])(\1+|[bc]*)$
At runtime, the branch involving the actual backref fails, as it's supposed
to, but then the other branch succeeds anyway.
We could no doubt fix this by some rearrangement of the operations in
parseqatom(), but that code is plenty ugly already, and what's more the
whole business of converting "x*" to "x+|" probably needs to go away to fix
another problem I'll mention in a moment. Instead, this patch suppresses
the *-conversion when the target is a simple backref atom, leaving the case
of m == 0 to be handled at runtime. This makes the patch in regcomp.c a
one-liner, at the cost of having to tweak cbrdissect() a little. In the
event I went a bit further than that and rewrote cbrdissect() to check all
the string-length-related conditions before it starts comparing characters.
It seems a bit stupid to possibly iterate through many copies of an
n-character backreference, only to fail at the end because the target
string's length isn't a multiple of n --- we could have found that out
before starting. The existing coding could only be a win if integer
division is hugely expensive compared to character comparison, but I don't
know of any modern machine where that might be true.
This does not fix all the problems with quantified back-references. In
particular, the code is still broken for back-references that appear within
a larger expression that is quantified (so that direct insertion of the
quantification limits into the BACKREF node doesn't apply). I think fixing
that will take some major surgery on the NFA code, specifically introducing
an explicit iteration node type instead of trying to transform iteration
into concatenation of modified regexps.
Back-patch to all supported branches. In HEAD, also add a regression test
case for this. (It may seem a bit silly to create a regression test file
for just one test case; but I'm expecting that we will soon import a whole
bunch of regex regression tests from Tcl, so might as well create the
infrastructure now.)
matching before recursing instead of after. The DFA match eliminates
unworkable midpoint choices a lot faster than the recursive check, in most
cases, so doing it first can speed things up; particularly in pathological
cases such as recently exhibited by Michael Glaesemann.
In addition, apply some cosmetic changes that were applied upstream (in the
Tcl project) at the same time, in order to sync with upstream version 1.15
of regexec.c.
Upstream apparently intends to backpatch this, so I will too. The
pathological behavior could be unpleasant if encountered in the field,
which seems to justify any risk of introducing new bugs.
Tom Lane, reviewed by Donal K. Fellows of Tcl project
The specification of this function is as follows.
regexp_replace(source text, pattern text, replacement text, [flags
text])
returns text
Replace string that matches to regular expression in source text to
replacement text.
- pattern is regular expression pattern.
- replacement is replace string that can use '\1'-'\9', and '\&'.
'\1'-'\9': back reference to the n'th subexpression.
'\&' : entire matched string.
- flags can use the following values:
g: global (replace all)
i: ignore case
When the flags is not specified, case sensitive, replace the first
instance only.
Atsushi Ogawa
(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.
postgres.h or c.h includes a system header (such as stdio.h or
stdlib.h), there's no need to specifically include it in any of the .c
files in the backend.
Neil Conway
Implement SQL99 SIMILAR TO as a synonym for our existing operator "~".
Implement SQL99 regular expression SUBSTRING(string FROM pat FOR escape).
Extend the definition to make the FOR clause optional.
Define textregexsubstr() to actually implement this feature.
Update the regression test to include these new string features.
All tests pass.
Rename the regular expression support routines from "pg95_xxx" to "pg_xxx".
Define CREATE CHARACTER SET in the parser per SQL99. No implementation yet.
definitions from K&R to ANSI C style, and fix broken assumption that
int and long are the same datatype. This repairs problems observed
on Alpha with regexps having between 32 and 63 states.
Included are patches intended for allowing PostgreSQL to handle
multi-byte charachter sets such as EUC(Extende Unix Code), Unicode and
Mule internal code. With the MB patch you can use multi-byte character
sets in regexp and LIKE. The encoding system chosen is determined at
the compile time.
To enable the MB extension, you need to define a variable "MB" in
Makefile.global or in Makefile.custom. For further information please
take a look at README.mb under doc directory.
(Note that unlike "jp patch" I do not use modified GNU regexp any
more. I changed Henry Spencer's regexp coming with PostgreSQL.)
