Module pattern 

Lua pattern matching engine — a port of lstrlib.c’s matcher. Pure functions over byte slices (stone candidate: no runtime types).

The matcher is the 5.2+ one (explicit pattern end, matchdepth bound); Flavor carries the few places where older dialects differ. 5.1’s NUL-terminated patterns are the caller’s business: it passes the pattern cut at the first NUL.

Structs

Match

A successful match against a Lua pattern, with the captures it produced.

PatError

Error returned by the pattern matcher (malformed pattern, runaway depth, invalid %f frontier, etc.).

Enums

Cap

One capture produced by a successful pattern match.

Functions

anchor_split

Split a leading ^ anchor from the pattern body. The caller decides what the anchor means (find/match scan at most once; gsub stops after the first position).

find

Scan from init for the first match (PUC str_find_aux without the plain fast path). A leading ^ anchors the search to init.

has_specials

Whether the pattern contains a byte from PUC’s SPECIALS; a pattern without one is searched for as plain text.

match_at

Try to match pat_body (already ^-stripped) at exactly position s, with no forward scan. Returns the Match (whose start == s) or None; a capture left open by a successful match is an error.

plain_find

Plain substring search (find with plain=true).