Re: Mixing greediness in regexp_matches

"Daniel Verite" <[email protected]> Mon, 23 Dec 2019 16:58:47 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.db.postgresql.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
	Tom Lane wrote:

> I'd try forcing the match to be the whole string, ie
> 
>         ^(.*?)(foo|bar|foobar)(.*)$
> 
> which would also save some work for restarting the iteration,
> since you'd have already captured the all-the-rest substring.

In that case regexp_matches will return 0 or 1 row. In the
above-mentioned example, that would be:

=> select regexp_matches('the string has foo and foobar and bar and more',
 '^(.*?)(foo|foobar|bar)(.*)$', 'g');
		     regexp_matches			
--------------------------------------------------------
 {"the string has ",foo," and foobar and bar and more"}

So the next iteration would consist of calling regexp_matches()
on result[3], and so on until no match is found.
I think it would work as desired, but probably much less efficiently on
large strings/large number of matches than if a single call of
regexp_matches() could return all matches.


Best regards,
-- 
Daniel Vérité
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