Re: A thought about regex versus multibyte character sets

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> I just spent a bit of time considering what we might do to fix this.
>> The idea mentioned in the above thread was to switch over to using
>> wchar_t in the regex code, but that seems to have a number of problems.
>> One showstopper is that on some platforms wchar_t is only 16 bits and
>> can't represent the full range of Unicode characters.  I don't want to
>> fix case-folding only to break regexes for other uses.

> We have a TODO item about having a regex specific data type.  Would
> implementing that solve this problem?

No, not particularly --- the stumbling block here is really impedance
mismatch between our internal APIs and libc's standard locale support.
The TODO item that would fix it is implementing our own locale support;
but I ain't holding my breath for that one.

AFAIR the motivation for a regex data type was solely performance.
        regards, tom lane