> 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.