[fpc-pascal] Regular expressions

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

I'm taking up the challenge in writing a Free Pascal & fpGUI newsgroup
reader. The main reason is really to archive the news content for
off-line processing, so that I can extend the WebNews (cgi
application) used by tiOPF and fpGUI projects to support searching
message content (headers and body) of newsgroups. I also want to use
the search feature for my custom written Wiki cgi application.  There
seems to be many people hosting private newsgroups, but don't have any
message body search feature.  The only alternative is to using
something like Mozilla Thunderbird and ask to download newsgroup
content for offline reading - though Thunderbird has some serious
Search bugs which makes it pretty useless for the task!

Anyway, for searching I was thinking of using regular expressions -
though I must admit, I know nothing of the subject (yet).
As a preliminary tally of what components I can use, I have the
following question:

How does the 'regexp' unit included in FCL compare to components like
TRegExpr [http://www.regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/TRegExpr.html] and I
heard some people mention PCRE?   Though I have no clue what the
latter is. :-)

PS:
If I am barking up the wrong tree and regular expressions are not the
way to go, please enlighten me of an alternative route.  eg; I would
love to sort the messages in a Firebird database, but does anybody
know if Firebird RDBMS supports of has some plugin for full text
search? I don't like MySQL by the way!


Regards,
  - Graeme -


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