regexport.c thought it could just ignore LACON arcs, but the correct
behavior is to treat them as satisfiable while consuming zero input
(rather reminiscently of commit 9f1e642d5). Otherwise, the emitted
simplified-NFA representation may contain no paths leading from initial
to final state, which unsurprisingly confuses pg_trgm, as seen in
bug #14623 from Jeff Janes.
Since regexport's output representation has no concept of an arc that
consumes zero input, recurse internally to find the next normal arc(s)
after any LACON transitions. We'd be forced into changing that
representation if a LACON could be the last arc reaching the final
state, but fortunately the regex library never builds NFAs with such
a configuration, so there always is a next normal arc.
Back-patch to 9.3 where this logic was introduced.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170413180503.25948.94871@wrigleys.postgresql.org
This works by extracting trigrams from the given regular expression,
in generally the same spirit as the previously-existing support for
LIKE searches, though of course the details are far more complicated.
Currently, only GIN indexes are supported. We might be able to make
it work with GiST indexes later.
The implementation includes adding API functions to backend/regex/
to provide a view of the search NFA created from a regular expression.
These functions are meant to be generic enough to be supportable in
a standalone version of the regex library, should that ever happen.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane
