Re: Inside the Regex Engine

Tom Lane wrote:

> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Fetter) writes:
>  
>
> > While PL/Perl is great, it's not available everywhere, and I'd like to
> > be able to grab atoms from a regex match in, say, a SELECT.  Is there
> > some way to get access to them?
> >    
>
> There's a three-parameter variant of substring() that allows extraction
> of a portion of a regex match --- unfortunately it uses SQL99's
> brain-dead notion of regex, which will not satisfy any Perl weenie :-(
>
> I think it'd be worth our while to define some comparable functionality
> that depends only on the POSIX regex engine ...
>  

substitute should be relatively straightforward, I guess; split and 
match maybe less so - what do you return? An array? Or you could require 
an explicit subscript to get a particular return value as in 
split_part(), which would be potentially inefficient if you want more 
than one (although I guess results could be cached).

cheers

andrew


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