| Home | Libraries | People | FAQ | More

### Standards Conformance

##### C++

Boost.Regex is intended to conform to the Technical Report on C++ Library Extensions.

##### ECMAScript / JavaScript

All of the ECMAScript regular expression syntax features are supported, except that:

The escape sequence \u matches any upper case character (the same as [[:upper:]]) rather than a Unicode escape sequence; use \x{DDDD} for Unicode escape sequences.

##### Perl

Almost all Perl features are supported, except for:

(?{code}) Not implementable in a compiled strongly typed language.

(??{code}) Not implementable in a compiled strongly typed language.

(*VERB) The backtracking control verbs are not recognised or implemented at this time.

In addition the following features behave slightly differently from Perl:

^ $ \Z These recognise any line termination sequence, and not just \n: see the Unicode requirements below.

##### POSIX

All the POSIX basic and extended regular expression features are supported, except that:

No character collating names are recognized except those specified in the POSIX standard for the C locale, unless they are explicitly registered with the traits class.

Character equivalence classes ( [[=a=]] etc) are probably buggy except on Win32. Implementing this feature requires knowledge of the format of the string sort keys produced by the system; if you need this, and the default implementation doesn't work on your platform, then you will need to supply a custom traits class.

##### Unicode

The following comments refer to Unicode Technical Standard #18: Unicode Regular Expressions version 11.

Item | Feature | Support
--- | --- | ---
1.1 | Hex Notation | Yes: use \x{DDDD} to refer to code point UDDDD.
1.2 | Character Properties | All the names listed under the General Category Property are supported. Script names and Other Names are not currently supported.
1.3 | Subtraction and Intersection | Indirectly support by forward-lookahead: `(?=[[:X:]])[[:Y:]]` Gives the intersection of character properties X and Y. `(?![[:X:]])[[:Y:]]` Gives everything in Y that is not in X (subtraction).
1.4 | Simple Word Boundaries | Conforming: non-spacing marks are included in the set of word characters.
1.5 | Caseless Matching | Supported, note that at this level, case transformations are 1:1, many to many case folding operations are not supported (for example "ß" to "SS").
1.6 | Line Boundaries | Supported, except that "." matches only one character of "\r\n". Other than that word boundaries match correctly; including not matching in the middle of a "\r\n" sequence.
1.7 | Code Points | Supported: provided you use the u32* algorithms, then UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are all treated as sequences of 32-bit code points.
2.1 | Canonical Equivalence | Not supported: it is up to the user of the library to convert all text into the same canonical form as the regular expression.
2.2 | Default Grapheme Clusters | Not supported.
2.3Default Word Boundaries | Not supported. |
2.4 | Default Loose Matches | Not Supported.
2.5 | Named Properties | Supported: the expression "[[:name:]]" or \N{name} matches the named character "name".
2.6 | Wildcard properties | Not Supported.
3.1 | Tailored Punctuation. | Not Supported.
3.2 | Tailored Grapheme Clusters | Not Supported.
3.3 | Tailored Word Boundaries. | Not Supported.
3.4 | Tailored Loose Matches | Partial support: [[=c=]] matches characters with the same primary equivalence class as "c".
3.5 | Tailored Ranges | Supported: [a-b] matches any character that collates in the range a to b, when the expression is constructed with the collate flag set.
3.6 | Context Matches | Not Supported.
3.7 | Incremental Matches | Supported: pass the flag `match_partial` to the regex algorithms.
3.8 | Unicode Set Sharing | Not Supported.
3.9 | Possible Match Sets | Not supported, however this information is used internally to optimise the matching of regular expressions, and return quickly if no match is possible.
3.10 | Folded Matching | Partial Support: It is possible to achieve a similar effect by using a custom regular expression traits class.
3.11 | Custom Submatch Evaluation | Not Supported.