[fpc-pascal] Regular expressions

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> 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!

Sphinx is a database full text search engine which has now also
support for Firebird. It has a library API so it should be easy
to interface to it from FPC.

It's on my list for some of our apps, but I didn't get around to
it yet.

Michael.