Hi Sergei,
I have some questions related to this project, foremost are of course
what kind of enhancement are you looking for? Are you looking for an update of existing code? I looked at the existing code and it seems to be the old regex library written by Henry Spencer. I did not look into it in detail, so I have no clear idea of the changes needed to bring it up to speed. Or are you looking to upgrade with an existing library? Or perhaps a rewrite suited to your needs? I can't see if you use the regex library for anything but deciding simple acceptance, but this would probably be a big factor in deciding. I would be happy to look into all three suggestions, or even a fourth, if you prefer something else.
There're two answers to that.
The first one - on the level of requirements, I am very much looking for multi-byte support in the regex library. And REGEX_REPLACE() function would be nice too - users ask for it quite often.
How will the REGEX_REPLACE() function work? The second answer - I thought that the simple way of getting multi-byte
support, would be to remove Henry Spencer library, and put some modern regex implementation instead. That could be relatively easy to do for any undegraduate student with little experience - this task was one of ideas we had for Google Summer of Code.
Agree, this is the simple solution. Did you already have a library picked out? Are there any requirements to license and language? Would it be useful if you could limit the amount of memory the library can use?
Now, with your experience, you may prefer to do something else - not replace the library, but rewrite it, or extend, whatever. I'm fine either way. It's only important that the result works with multi-byte character sets (ideally - our character set code), and that it can support Henry Spencer regex syntax.
What I would really like to do, is rewrite the thing! However, I do not have an unlimited amount of time for this project. I'll look into Henry Spencers old library and let you know what I decide to do. -- Line Bie Pedersen