Struct regex::RegexSet
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pub struct RegexSet(_);
Match multiple (possibly overlapping) regular expressions in a single scan.
A regex set corresponds to the union of two or more regular expressions.
That is, a regex set will match text where at least one of its
constituent regular expressions matches. A regex set as its formulated here
provides a touch more power: it will also report which regular
expressions in the set match. Indeed, this is the key difference between
regex sets and a single Regex
with many alternates, since only one
alternate can match at a time.
For example, consider regular expressions to match email addresses and
domains: [a-z]+@[a-z]+\.(com|org|net)
and [a-z]+\.(com|org|net)
. If a
regex set is constructed from those regexes, then searching the text
foo@example.com
will report both regexes as matching. Of course, one
could accomplish this by compiling each regex on its own and doing two
searches over the text. The key advantage of using a regex set is that it
will report the matching regexes using a single pass through the text.
If one has hundreds or thousands of regexes to match repeatedly (like a URL
router for a complex web application or a user agent matcher), then a regex
set can realize huge performance gains.
Example
This shows how the above two regexes (for matching email addresses and domains) might work:
let set = RegexSet::new(&[ r"[a-z]+@[a-z]+\.(com|org|net)", r"[a-z]+\.(com|org|net)", ]).unwrap(); // Ask whether any regexes in the set match. assert!(set.is_match("foo@example.com")); // Identify which regexes in the set match. let matches: Vec<_> = set.matches("foo@example.com").into_iter().collect(); assert_eq!(vec![0, 1], matches); // Try again, but with text that only matches one of the regexes. let matches: Vec<_> = set.matches("example.com").into_iter().collect(); assert_eq!(vec![1], matches); // Try again, but with text that doesn't match any regex in the set. let matches: Vec<_> = set.matches("example").into_iter().collect(); assert!(matches.is_empty());
Note that it would be possible to adapt the above example to using Regex
with an expression like:
(?P<email>[a-z]+@(?P<email_domain>[a-z]+[.](com|org|net)))|(?P<domain>[a-z]+[.](com|org|net))
After a match, one could then inspect the capture groups to figure out which alternates matched. The problem is that it is hard to make this approach scale when there are many regexes since the overlap between each alternate isn't always obvious to reason about.
Limitations
Regex sets are limited to answering the following two questions:
- Does any regex in the set match?
- If so, which regexes in the set match?
As with the main Regex
type, it is cheaper to ask (1) instead of (2)
since the matching engines can stop after the first match is found.
Other features like finding the location of successive matches or their sub-captures aren't supported. If you need this functionality, the recommended approach is to compile each regex in the set independently and selectively match them based on which regexes in the set matched.
Performance
A RegexSet
has the same performance characteristics as Regex
. Namely,
search takes O(mn)
time, where m
is proportional to the size of the
regex set and n
is proportional to the length of the search text.
Methods
impl RegexSet
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fn new<I, S>(exprs: I) -> Result<RegexSet, Error> where
S: AsRef<str>,
I: IntoIterator<Item = S>,
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S: AsRef<str>,
I: IntoIterator<Item = S>,
Create a new regex set with the given regular expressions.
This takes an iterator of S
, where S
is something that can produce
a &str
. If any of the strings in the iterator are not valid regular
expressions, then an error is returned.
Example
Create a new regex set from an iterator of strings:
let set = RegexSet::new(&[r"\w+", r"\d+"]).unwrap(); assert!(set.is_match("foo"));
fn is_match(&self, text: &str) -> bool
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Returns true if and only if one of the regexes in this set matches the text given.
This method should be preferred if you only need to test whether any of the regexes in the set should match, but don't care about which regexes matched. This is because the underlying matching engine will quit immediately after seeing the first match instead of continuing to find all matches.
Note that as with searches using Regex
, the expression is unanchored
by default. That is, if the regex does not start with ^
or \A
, or
end with $
or \z
, then it is permitted to match anywhere in the
text.
Example
Tests whether a set matches some text:
let set = RegexSet::new(&[r"\w+", r"\d+"]).unwrap(); assert!(set.is_match("foo")); assert!(!set.is_match("☃"));
fn matches(&self, text: &str) -> SetMatches
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Returns the set of regular expressions that match in the given text.
The set returned contains the index of each regular expression that
matches in the given text. The index is in correspondence with the
order of regular expressions given to RegexSet
's constructor.
The set can also be used to iterate over the matched indices.
Note that as with searches using Regex
, the expression is unanchored
by default. That is, if the regex does not start with ^
or \A
, or
end with $
or \z
, then it is permitted to match anywhere in the
text.
Example
Tests which regular expressions match the given text:
let set = RegexSet::new(&[ r"\w+", r"\d+", r"\pL+", r"foo", r"bar", r"barfoo", r"foobar", ]).unwrap(); let matches: Vec<_> = set.matches("foobar").into_iter().collect(); assert_eq!(matches, vec![0, 2, 3, 4, 6]); // You can also test whether a particular regex matched: let matches = set.matches("foobar"); assert!(!matches.matched(5)); assert!(matches.matched(6));
fn len(&self) -> usize
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Returns the total number of regular expressions in this set.
Trait Implementations
impl Clone for RegexSet
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fn clone(&self) -> RegexSet
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Returns a copy of the value. Read more
fn clone_from(&mut self, source: &Self)
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Performs copy-assignment from source
. Read more