Have you ever dreamed to use regular expressions in your Progress ABL L4G applications without depending on .NET? Now you can do it!
We developed a wrapper for the Windows and HP-UX ia64 11.31 versions of the PCRE library. It is very easy to use. Just instantiate the class, and use its methods.
You can find the code and more explanations in our GitHub repository :
File details :
inc/regex.def: TEMP-TABLE definitions for storing matches and sub-matches
inc/regex.ds: DATASET definition holding the temp-tables
inc/regex.i: can be included in any .p program to add support for native PCRE functions; uses the PCRE library DLL or shared library
lib/pcre-msvc-x86.dll: PCRE library for Windows 32 bits
lib/pcre-msvc-x64.dll: PCRE library for Windows 64 bits
lib/libpcre.so: PCRE library for HP-UX 11.31 ia64
lib/libgcc_s.so.0: needed for PCRE library to work on HP-UX
lib/libgcc_s.so.0.README: just read it!
regex.p: a container for regex.i
Regex.cls: a class that can perform regex operations; uses regex.p
Binary.cls: an helper class to perform bitwise operations
As you can see in the include file, we use the following functions of the PCRE library:
pcre_compile2
pcre_study
pcre_exec
pcre_fullinfo
pcre_config
The methods in the Regex.cls class are quite straitforward:
mMatch: returns true if there's a match
mNumMatches: returns the number of matches, or a number below or equal to zero in case of error
mGetMatches: returns the number of matches and populate a dataset of matches and sub-matches
mReplace: performs a regex replace of a string with another string (sub-matches placeholders are supported in replacement string)
To use our class, just place all the files in your project and start using it!
You can build a copy of pcre DLL yourself (even x64) by getting it at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcre/files/ and opening the folder in Visual Studio. Configure it to build the shared libraries and support JIT compilation. Then define PCRE_LIB preprocessor variable to whatever DLL name you have. I built and included a Release version of PCRE with shared libs, JIT, UTF8 support both in 32 bits (x86) and 64 bits (x64) and I renamed the resulting pcre.dll to pcre-msvc-x64.dll and pcre-msvc-x86.dll.