Crate regex_lite

source ·
Expand description

This crate provides a lightweight regex engine for searching strings. The regex syntax supported by this crate is nearly identical to what is found in the regex crate. Like the regex crate, all regex searches in this crate have worst case O(m * n) time complexity, where m is proportional to the size of the regex and n is proportional to the size of the string being searched.

The principal difference between the regex and regex-lite crates is that the latter prioritizes smaller binary sizes and shorter Rust compile times over performance and functionality. As a result, regex searches in this crate are typically substantially slower than what is provided by the regex crate. Moreover, this crate only has the most basic level of Unicode support: it matches codepoint by codepoint but otherwise doesn’t support Unicode case insensivity or things like \p{Letter}. In exchange, this crate contributes far less to binary size and compiles much more quickly.

If you just want API documentation, then skip to the Regex type. Otherwise, here’s a quick example showing one way of parsing the output of a grep-like program:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?m)^([^:]+):([0-9]+):(.+)$").unwrap();
let hay = "\
path/to/foo:54:Blue Harvest
path/to/bar:90:Something, Something, Something, Dark Side
path/to/baz:3:It's a Trap!
";

let mut results = vec![];
for (_, [path, lineno, line]) in re.captures_iter(hay).map(|c| c.extract()) {
    results.push((path, lineno.parse::<u64>()?, line));
}
assert_eq!(results, vec![
    ("path/to/foo", 54, "Blue Harvest"),
    ("path/to/bar", 90, "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side"),
    ("path/to/baz", 3, "It's a Trap!"),
]);

§Overview

The primary type in this crate is a Regex. Its most important methods are as follows:

  • Regex::new compiles a regex using the default configuration. A RegexBuilder permits setting a non-default configuration. (For example, case insensitive matching, verbose mode and others.)
  • Regex::is_match reports whether a match exists in a particular haystack.
  • Regex::find reports the byte offsets of a match in a haystack, if one exists. Regex::find_iter returns an iterator over all such matches.
  • Regex::captures returns a Captures, which reports both the byte offsets of a match in a haystack and the byte offsets of each matching capture group from the regex in the haystack. Regex::captures_iter returns an iterator over all such matches.

Otherwise, this top-level crate documentation is organized as follows:

  • Usage shows how to add the regex crate to your Rust project.
  • Examples provides a limited selection of regex search examples.
  • Differences with the regex crate provides a precise description of how regex-lite differs from regex.
  • Syntax enumerates the specific regex syntax supported by this crate.
  • Untrusted input discusses how this crate deals with regex patterns or haystacks that are untrusted.

§Usage

The regex-lite crate is on crates.io and can be used by adding regex-lite to your dependencies in your project’s Cargo.toml. Or more simply, just run cargo add regex-lite.

Here is a complete example that creates a new Rust project, adds a dependency on regex-lite, creates the source code for a regex search and then runs the program.

First, create the project in a new directory:

$ mkdir regex-example
$ cd regex-example
$ cargo init

Second, add a dependency on regex:

$ cargo add regex-lite

Third, edit src/main.rs. Delete what’s there and replace it with this:

use regex_lite::Regex;

fn main() {
    let re = Regex::new(r"Hello (?<name>\w+)!").unwrap();
    let Some(caps) = re.captures("Hello Murphy!") else {
        println!("no match!");
        return;
    };
    println!("The name is: {}", &caps["name"]);
}

Fourth, run it with cargo run:

$ cargo run
   Compiling regex-lite v0.1.0
   Compiling regex-example v0.1.0 (/tmp/regex-example)
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 4.22s
     Running `target/debug/regex-example`
The name is: Murphy

The first time you run the program will show more output like above. But subsequent runs shouldn’t have to re-compile the dependencies.

§Examples

This section provides a few examples, in tutorial style, showing how to search a haystack with a regex. There are more examples throughout the API documentation.

Before starting though, it’s worth defining a few terms:

  • A regex is a Rust value whose type is Regex. We use re as a variable name for a regex.
  • A pattern is the string that is used to build a regex. We use pat as a variable name for a pattern.
  • A haystack is the string that is searched by a regex. We use hay as a variable name for a haystack.

Sometimes the words “regex” and “pattern” are used interchangeably.

General use of regular expressions in this crate proceeds by compiling a pattern into a regex, and then using that regex to search, split or replace parts of a haystack.

§Example: find a middle initial

We’ll start off with a very simple example: a regex that looks for a specific name but uses a wildcard to match a middle initial. Our pattern serves as something like a template that will match a particular name with any middle initial.

use regex_lite::Regex;

// We use 'unwrap()' here because it would be a bug in our program if the
// pattern failed to compile to a regex. Panicking in the presence of a bug
// is okay.
let re = Regex::new(r"Homer (.)\. Simpson").unwrap();
let hay = "Homer J. Simpson";
let Some(caps) = re.captures(hay) else { return };
assert_eq!("J", &caps[1]);

There are a few things worth noticing here in our first example:

  • The . is a special pattern meta character that means “match any single character except for new lines.” (More precisely, in this crate, it means “match any UTF-8 encoding of any Unicode scalar value other than \n.”)
  • We can match an actual . literally by escaping it, i.e., \..
  • We use Rust’s raw strings to avoid needing to deal with escape sequences in both the regex pattern syntax and in Rust’s string literal syntax. If we didn’t use raw strings here, we would have had to use \\. to match a literal . character. That is, r"\." and "\\." are equivalent patterns.
  • We put our wildcard . instruction in parentheses. These parentheses have a special meaning that says, “make whatever part of the haystack matches within these parentheses available as a capturing group.” After finding a match, we access this capture group with &caps[1].

Otherwise, we execute a search using re.captures(hay) and return from our function if no match occurred. We then reference the middle initial by asking for the part of the haystack that matched the capture group indexed at 1. (The capture group at index 0 is implicit and always corresponds to the entire match. In this case, that’s Homer J. Simpson.)

§Example: named capture groups

Continuing from our middle initial example above, we can tweak the pattern slightly to give a name to the group that matches the middle initial:

use regex_lite::Regex;

// Note that (?P<middle>.) is a different way to spell the same thing.
let re = Regex::new(r"Homer (?<middle>.)\. Simpson").unwrap();
let hay = "Homer J. Simpson";
let Some(caps) = re.captures(hay) else { return };
assert_eq!("J", &caps["middle"]);

Giving a name to a group can be useful when there are multiple groups in a pattern. It makes the code referring to those groups a bit easier to understand.

§Example: validating a particular date format

This examples shows how to confirm whether a haystack, in its entirety, matches a particular date format:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$").unwrap();
assert!(re.is_match("2010-03-14"));

Notice the use of the ^ and $ anchors. In this crate, every regex search is run with an implicit (?s:.)*? at the beginning of its pattern, which allows the regex to match anywhere in a haystack. Anchors, as above, can be used to ensure that the full haystack matches a pattern.

§Example: finding dates in a haystack

In the previous example, we showed how one might validate that a haystack, in its entirety, corresponded to a particular date format. But what if we wanted to extract all things that look like dates in a specific format from a haystack? To do this, we can use an iterator API to find all matches (notice that we’ve removed the anchors):

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}").unwrap();
let hay = "What do 1865-04-14, 1881-07-02, 1901-09-06 and 1963-11-22 have in common?";
// 'm' is a 'Match', and 'as_str()' returns the matching part of the haystack.
let dates: Vec<&str> = re.find_iter(hay).map(|m| m.as_str()).collect();
assert_eq!(dates, vec![
    "1865-04-14",
    "1881-07-02",
    "1901-09-06",
    "1963-11-22",
]);

We can also iterate over Captures values instead of Match values, and that in turn permits accessing each component of the date via capturing groups:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?<y>\d{4})-(?<m>\d{2})-(?<d>\d{2})").unwrap();
let hay = "What do 1865-04-14, 1881-07-02, 1901-09-06 and 1963-11-22 have in common?";
// 'm' is a 'Match', and 'as_str()' returns the matching part of the haystack.
let dates: Vec<(&str, &str, &str)> = re.captures_iter(hay).map(|caps| {
    // The unwraps are okay because every capture group must match if the whole
    // regex matches, and in this context, we know we have a match.
    //
    // Note that we use `caps.name("y").unwrap().as_str()` instead of
    // `&caps["y"]` because the lifetime of the former is the same as the
    // lifetime of `hay` above, but the lifetime of the latter is tied to the
    // lifetime of `caps` due to how the `Index` trait is defined.
    let year = caps.name("y").unwrap().as_str();
    let month = caps.name("m").unwrap().as_str();
    let day = caps.name("d").unwrap().as_str();
    (year, month, day)
}).collect();
assert_eq!(dates, vec![
    ("1865", "04", "14"),
    ("1881", "07", "02"),
    ("1901", "09", "06"),
    ("1963", "11", "22"),
]);

§Example: simpler capture group extraction

One can use Captures::extract to make the code from the previous example a bit simpler in this case:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})").unwrap();
let hay = "What do 1865-04-14, 1881-07-02, 1901-09-06 and 1963-11-22 have in common?";
let dates: Vec<(&str, &str, &str)> = re.captures_iter(hay).map(|caps| {
    let (_, [year, month, day]) = caps.extract();
    (year, month, day)
}).collect();
assert_eq!(dates, vec![
    ("1865", "04", "14"),
    ("1881", "07", "02"),
    ("1901", "09", "06"),
    ("1963", "11", "22"),
]);

Captures::extract works by ensuring that the number of matching groups match the number of groups requested via the [year, month, day] syntax. If they do, then the substrings for each corresponding capture group are automatically returned in an appropriately sized array. Rust’s syntax for pattern matching arrays does the rest.

§Example: replacement with named capture groups

Building on the previous example, perhaps we’d like to rearrange the date formats. This can be done by finding each match and replacing it with something different. The Regex::replace_all routine provides a convenient way to do this, including by supporting references to named groups in the replacement string:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?<y>\d{4})-(?<m>\d{2})-(?<d>\d{2})").unwrap();
let before = "1973-01-05, 1975-08-25 and 1980-10-18";
let after = re.replace_all(before, "$m/$d/$y");
assert_eq!(after, "01/05/1973, 08/25/1975 and 10/18/1980");

The replace methods are actually polymorphic in the replacement, which provides more flexibility than is seen here. (See the documentation for Regex::replace for more details.)

§Example: verbose mode

When your regex gets complicated, you might consider using something other than regex. But if you stick with regex, you can use the x flag to enable insignificant whitespace mode or “verbose mode.” In this mode, whitespace is treated as insignificant and one may write comments. This may make your patterns easier to comprehend.

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?x)
  (?P<y>\d{4}) # the year
  -
  (?P<m>\d{2}) # the month
  -
  (?P<d>\d{2}) # the day
").unwrap();

let before = "1973-01-05, 1975-08-25 and 1980-10-18";
let after = re.replace_all(before, "$m/$d/$y");
assert_eq!(after, "01/05/1973, 08/25/1975 and 10/18/1980");

If you wish to match against whitespace in this mode, you can still use \s, \n, \t, etc. For escaping a single space character, you can escape it directly with \ , use its hex character code \x20 or temporarily disable the x flag, e.g., (?-x: ).

§Differences with the regex crate

As mentioned in the introduction above, the purpose of this crate is to prioritize small binary sizes and shorter Rust compilation times as much as possible. Namely, while the regex crate tends to eschew both binary size and compilation time in favor of faster searches and features, the regex-lite crate gives up faster searches and some functionality in exchange for smaller binary sizes and faster compilation times.

The precise set of differences at the syntax level:

  • The Perl character classes are limited to ASCII codepoints. That is, \d is [0-9], \s is [\t\n\v\f\r ] and \w is [0-9A-Za-z_].
  • Unicode character classes of the form \p{...} and \P{...} are not supported at all. Note though that things like [^β] are still supported and will match any Unicode scalar value except for β.
  • Case insensitive searching is limited to ASCII case insensitivity.
  • Character class set operations other than union are not supported. That is, difference (--), intersection (&&) and symmetric difference (~~) are not available. These tend to be most useful with Unicode classes, which also aren’t available.
  • Opt-in octal support is not available in this crate.

And now at the API level:

  • Currently, this crate only supports searching &str. It does not have APIs for searching &[u8] haystacks, although it is planned to add these in the future if there’s demand.
  • There is no RegexSet in this crate and there are no plans to add it.
  • The Error type in this crate is completely opaque.

Other than these things, the regex-lite crate is intended to be a drop-in replacement for the regex crate. In most cases, you can just replace use regex::Regex; with use regex_lite::Regex; and everything will work. (Unless you’re depending on Unicode support in your regexes.)

§Syntax

The syntax supported in this crate is documented below.

§Matching one character

.             any character except new line (includes new line with s flag)
[0-9]         any ASCII digit
\d            digit ([0-9])
\D            not digit

§Character classes

[xyz]         A character class matching either x, y or z (union).
[^xyz]        A character class matching any character except x, y and z.
[a-z]         A character class matching any character in range a-z.
[[:alpha:]]   ASCII character class ([A-Za-z])
[[:^alpha:]]  Negated ASCII character class ([^A-Za-z])
[\[\]]        Escaping in character classes (matching [ or ])

Any ASCII or Perl character class may appear inside a bracketed [...] character class. For example, [\s[:digit:]] matches any digit or space character.

Precedence in character classes, from most binding to least:

  1. Ranges: [a-cd] == [[a-c]d]
  2. Union: [ab&&bc] == [[ab]&&[bc]]
  3. Negation: [^a-z&&b] == [^[a-z&&b]].

§Composites

xy    concatenation (x followed by y)
x|y   alternation (x or y, prefer x)

This example shows how an alternation works, and what it means to prefer a branch in the alternation over subsequent branches.

use regex_lite::Regex;

let haystack = "samwise";
// If 'samwise' comes first in our alternation, then it is
// preferred as a match, even if the regex engine could
// technically detect that 'sam' led to a match earlier.
let re = Regex::new(r"samwise|sam").unwrap();
assert_eq!("samwise", re.find(haystack).unwrap().as_str());
// But if 'sam' comes first, then it will match instead.
// In this case, it is impossible for 'samwise' to match
// because 'sam' is a prefix of it.
let re = Regex::new(r"sam|samwise").unwrap();
assert_eq!("sam", re.find(haystack).unwrap().as_str());

§Repetitions

x*        zero or more of x (greedy)
x+        one or more of x (greedy)
x?        zero or one of x (greedy)
x*?       zero or more of x (ungreedy/lazy)
x+?       one or more of x (ungreedy/lazy)
x??       zero or one of x (ungreedy/lazy)
x{n,m}    at least n x and at most m x (greedy)
x{n,}     at least n x (greedy)
x{n}      exactly n x
x{n,m}?   at least n x and at most m x (ungreedy/lazy)
x{n,}?    at least n x (ungreedy/lazy)
x{n}?     exactly n x

§Empty matches

^               the beginning of a haystack (or start-of-line with multi-line mode)
$               the end of a haystack (or end-of-line with multi-line mode)
\A              only the beginning of a haystack (even with multi-line mode enabled)
\z              only the end of a haystack (even with multi-line mode enabled)
\b              an ASCII word boundary (\w on one side and \W, \A, or \z on other)
\B              not an ASCII word boundary
\b{start}, \<   an ASCII start-of-word boundary (\W|\A on the left, \w on the right)
\b{end}, \>     an ASCII end-of-word boundary (\w on the left, \W|\z on the right))
\b{start-half}  half of an ASCII start-of-word boundary (\W|\A on the left)
\b{end-half}    half of an ASCII end-of-word boundary (\W|\z on the right)

The empty regex is valid and matches the empty string. For example, the empty regex matches abc at positions 0, 1, 2 and 3. When using the top-level Regex on &str haystacks, an empty match that splits a codepoint is guaranteed to never be returned. For example:

let re = regex_lite::Regex::new(r"").unwrap();
let ranges: Vec<_> = re.find_iter("💩").map(|m| m.range()).collect();
assert_eq!(ranges, vec![0..0, 4..4]);

Note that an empty regex is distinct from a regex that can never match. For example, the regex [^\s\S] is a character class that represents the negation of [\s\S], where the union of \s and \S corresponds to all Unicode scalar values. The negation of everything is nothing, which means the character class is empty. Since nothing is in the empty set, [^\s\S] matches nothing, not even the empty string.

§Grouping and flags

(exp)          numbered capture group (indexed by opening parenthesis)
(?P<name>exp)  named (also numbered) capture group (names must be alpha-numeric)
(?<name>exp)   named (also numbered) capture group (names must be alpha-numeric)
(?:exp)        non-capturing group
(?flags)       set flags within current group
(?flags:exp)   set flags for exp (non-capturing)

Capture group names must be any sequence of alpha-numeric Unicode codepoints, in addition to ., _, [ and ]. Names must start with either an _ or an alphabetic codepoint. Alphabetic codepoints correspond to the Alphabetic Unicode property, while numeric codepoints correspond to the union of the Decimal_Number, Letter_Number and Other_Number general categories.

Flags are each a single character. For example, (?x) sets the flag x and (?-x) clears the flag x. Multiple flags can be set or cleared at the same time: (?xy) sets both the x and y flags and (?x-y) sets the x flag and clears the y flag.

All flags are by default disabled unless stated otherwise. They are:

i     case-insensitive: letters match both upper and lower case
m     multi-line mode: ^ and $ match begin/end of line
s     allow . to match \n
R     enables CRLF mode: when multi-line mode is enabled, \r\n is used
U     swap the meaning of x* and x*?
x     verbose mode, ignores whitespace and allow line comments (starting with `#`)

Note that in verbose mode, whitespace is ignored everywhere, including within character classes. To insert whitespace, use its escaped form or a hex literal. For example, \ or \x20 for an ASCII space.

Flags can be toggled within a pattern. Here’s an example that matches case-insensitively for the first part but case-sensitively for the second part:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?i)a+(?-i)b+").unwrap();
let m = re.find("AaAaAbbBBBb").unwrap();
assert_eq!(m.as_str(), "AaAaAbb");

Notice that the a+ matches either a or A, but the b+ only matches b.

Multi-line mode means ^ and $ no longer match just at the beginning/end of the input, but also at the beginning/end of lines:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?m)^line \d+").unwrap();
let m = re.find("line one\nline 2\n").unwrap();
assert_eq!(m.as_str(), "line 2");

Note that ^ matches after new lines, even at the end of input:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?m)^").unwrap();
let m = re.find_iter("test\n").last().unwrap();
assert_eq!((m.start(), m.end()), (5, 5));

When both CRLF mode and multi-line mode are enabled, then ^ and $ will match either \r and \n, but never in the middle of a \r\n:

use regex_lite::Regex;

let re = Regex::new(r"(?mR)^foo$").unwrap();
let m = re.find("\r\nfoo\r\n").unwrap();
assert_eq!(m.as_str(), "foo");

§Escape sequences

Note that this includes all possible escape sequences, even ones that are documented elsewhere.

\*              literal *, applies to all ASCII except [0-9A-Za-z<>]
\a              bell (\x07)
\f              form feed (\x0C)
\t              horizontal tab
\n              new line
\r              carriage return
\v              vertical tab (\x0B)
\A              matches at the beginning of a haystack
\z              matches at the end of a haystack
\b              word boundary assertion
\B              negated word boundary assertion
\b{start}, \<   start-of-word boundary assertion
\b{end}, \>     end-of-word boundary assertion
\b{start-half}  half of a start-of-word boundary assertion
\b{end-half}    half of a end-of-word boundary assertion
\x7F            hex character code (exactly two digits)
\x{10FFFF}      any hex character code corresponding to a Unicode code point
\u007F          hex character code (exactly four digits)
\u{7F}          any hex character code corresponding to a Unicode code point
\U0000007F      hex character code (exactly eight digits)
\U{7F}          any hex character code corresponding to a Unicode code point
\d, \s, \w      Perl character class
\D, \S, \W      negated Perl character class

§Perl character classes (ASCII only)

These character classes are short-hands for common groups of characters. In this crate, \d, \s and \w only consist of ASCII codepoints.

\d     digit ([0-9])
\D     not digit
\s     whitespace ([\t\n\v\f\r ])
\S     not whitespace
\w     word character ([0-9A-Za-z_])
\W     not word character

§ASCII character classes

These reflect additional groups of characters taken from POSIX regex syntax that are sometimes useful to have. In this crate, all of these classes only consist of ASCII codepoints.

[[:alnum:]]    alphanumeric ([0-9A-Za-z])
[[:alpha:]]    alphabetic ([A-Za-z])
[[:ascii:]]    ASCII ([\x00-\x7F])
[[:blank:]]    blank ([\t ])
[[:cntrl:]]    control ([\x00-\x1F\x7F])
[[:digit:]]    digits ([0-9])
[[:graph:]]    graphical ([!-~])
[[:lower:]]    lower case ([a-z])
[[:print:]]    printable ([ -~])
[[:punct:]]    punctuation ([!-/:-@\[-`{-~])
[[:space:]]    whitespace ([\t\n\v\f\r ])
[[:upper:]]    upper case ([A-Z])
[[:word:]]     word characters ([0-9A-Za-z_])
[[:xdigit:]]   hex digit ([0-9A-Fa-f])

§Untrusted input

This crate is meant to be able to run regex searches on untrusted haystacks without fear of ReDoS. This crate also, to a certain extent, supports untrusted patterns.

This crate differs from most (but not all) other regex engines in that it doesn’t use unbounded backtracking to run a regex search. In those cases, one generally cannot use untrusted patterns or untrusted haystacks because it can be very difficult to know whether a particular pattern will result in catastrophic backtracking or not.

We’ll first discuss how this crate deals with untrusted inputs and then wrap it up with a realistic discussion about what practice really looks like.

§Panics

Outside of clearly documented cases, most APIs in this crate are intended to never panic regardless of the inputs given to them. For example, Regex::new, Regex::is_match, Regex::find and Regex::captures should never panic. That is, it is an API promise that those APIs will never panic no matter what inputs are given to them. With that said, regex engines are complicated beasts, and providing a rock solid guarantee that these APIs literally never panic is essentially equivalent to saying, “there are no bugs in this library.” That is a bold claim, and not really one that can be feasibly made with a straight face.

Don’t get the wrong impression here. This crate is extensively tested, not just with unit and integration tests, but also via fuzz testing. For example, this crate is part of the OSS-fuzz project. Panics should be incredibly rare, but it is possible for bugs to exist, and thus possible for a panic to occur. If you need a rock solid guarantee against panics, then you should wrap calls into this library with std::panic::catch_unwind.

It’s also worth pointing out that this library will generally panic when other regex engines would commit undefined behavior. When undefined behavior occurs, your program might continue as if nothing bad has happened, but it also might mean your program is open to the worst kinds of exploits. In contrast, the worst thing a panic can do is a denial of service.

§Untrusted patterns

The principal way this crate deals with them is by limiting their size by default. The size limit can be configured via RegexBuilder::size_limit. The idea of a size limit is that compiling a pattern into a Regex will fail if it becomes “too big.” Namely, while most resources consumed by compiling a regex are approximately proportional to the length of the pattern itself, there is one particular exception to this: counted repetitions. Namely, this pattern:

a{5}{5}{5}{5}{5}{5}

Is equivalent to this pattern:

a{15625}

In both of these cases, the actual pattern string is quite small, but the resulting Regex value is quite large. Indeed, as the first pattern shows, it isn’t enough to locally limit the size of each repetition because they can be stacked in a way that results in exponential growth.

To provide a bit more context, a simplified view of regex compilation looks like this:

  • The pattern string is parsed into a structured representation called an HIR (high-level intermediate representation). Counted repetitions are not expanded in this stage. That is, the size of the HIR is proportional to the size of the pattern with “reasonable” constant factors. In other words, one can reasonably limit the memory used by an HIR by limiting the length of the pattern string.
  • The HIR is compiled into a Thompson NFA. This is the stage at which something like \w{5} is rewritten to \w\w\w\w\w. Thus, this is the stage at which RegexBuilder::size_limit is enforced. If the NFA exceeds the configured size, then this stage will fail.

The size limit helps avoid two different kinds of exorbitant resource usage:

  • It avoids permitting exponential memory usage based on the size of the pattern string.
  • It avoids long search times. This will be discussed in more detail in the next section, but worst case search time is dependent on the size of the regex. So keeping regexes limited to a reasonable size is also a way of keeping search times reasonable.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that regex compilation is guaranteed to take worst case O(m) time, where m is proportional to the size of regex. The size of the regex here is after the counted repetitions have been expanded.

Advice for those using untrusted regexes: limit the pattern length to something small and expand it as needed. Configure RegexBuilder::size_limit to something small and then expand it as needed.

§Untrusted haystacks

The main way this crate guards against searches from taking a long time is by using algorithms that guarantee a O(m * n) worst case time and space bound. Namely:

  • m is proportional to the size of the regex, where the size of the regex includes the expansion of all counted repetitions. (See the previous section on untrusted patterns.)
  • n is proportional to the length, in bytes, of the haystack.

In other words, if you consider m to be a constant (for example, the regex pattern is a literal in the source code), then the search can be said to run in “linear time.” Or equivalently, “linear time with respect to the size of the haystack.”

But the m factor here is important not to ignore. If a regex is particularly big, the search times can get quite slow. This is why, in part, RegexBuilder::size_limit exists.

Advice for those searching untrusted haystacks: As long as your regexes are not enormous, you should expect to be able to search untrusted haystacks without fear. If you aren’t sure, you should benchmark it. Unlike backtracking engines, if your regex is so big that it’s likely to result in slow searches, this is probably something you’ll be able to observe regardless of what the haystack is made up of.

§Iterating over matches

One thing that is perhaps easy to miss is that the worst case time complexity bound of O(m * n) applies to methods like Regex::is_match, Regex::find and Regex::captures. It does not apply to Regex::find_iter or Regex::captures_iter. Namely, since iterating over all matches can execute many searches, and each search can scan the entire haystack, the worst case time complexity for iterators is O(m * n^2).

One example of where this occurs is when a pattern consists of an alternation, where an earlier branch of the alternation requires scanning the entire haystack only to discover that there is no match. It also requires a later branch of the alternation to have matched at the beginning of the search. For example, consider the pattern .*[^A-Z]|[A-Z] and the haystack AAAAA. The first search will scan to the end looking for matches of .*[^A-Z] even though a finite automata engine (as in this crate) knows that [A-Z] has already matched the first character of the haystack. This is due to the greedy nature of regex searching. That first search will report a match at the first A only after scanning to the end to discover that no other match exists. The next search then begins at the second A and the behavior repeats.

There is no way to avoid this. This means that if both patterns and haystacks are untrusted and you’re iterating over all matches, you’re susceptible to worst case quadratic time complexity. One possible way to mitigate this is to switch to the lower level regex-automata crate and use its meta::Regex iterator APIs. There, you can configure the search to operate in “earliest” mode by passing a Input::new(haystack).earliest(true) to meta::Regex::find_iter (for example). By enabling this mode, you give up the normal greedy match semantics of regex searches and instead ask the regex engine to immediately stop as soon as a match has been found. Enabling this mode will thus restore the worst case O(m * n) time complexity bound, but at the cost of different semantics.

§Untrusted inputs in practice

While providing a O(m * n) worst case time bound on all searches goes a long way toward preventing ReDoS, that doesn’t mean every search you can possibly run will complete without burning CPU time. In general, there are a few ways for the m * n time bound to still bite you:

  • You are searching an exceptionally long haystack. No matter how you slice it, a longer haystack will take more time to search.
  • Very large regexes can searches to be quite slow due to increasing the size m in the worst case O(m * n) bound. This is especially true when they are combined with counted repetitions. While the regex size limit above will protect you from the most egregious cases, the default size limit still permits pretty big regexes that can execute more slowly than one might expect.
  • While routines like Regex::find and Regex::captures guarantee worst case O(m * n) search time, routines like Regex::find_iter and Regex::captures_iter actually have worst case O(m * n^2) search time. This is because find_iter runs many searches, and each search takes worst case O(m * n) time. Thus, iteration of all matches in a haystack has worst case O(m * n^2). A good example of a pattern that exhibits this is (?:A+){1000}| or even .*[^A-Z]|[A-Z].

In general, unstrusted haystacks are easier to stomach than untrusted patterns. Untrusted patterns give a lot more control to the caller to impact the performance of a search. Therefore, permitting untrusted patterns means that your only line of defense is to put a limit on how big m (and perhaps also n) can be in O(m * n). n is limited by simply inspecting the length of the haystack while m is limited by both applying a limit to the length of the pattern and a limit on the compiled size of the regex via RegexBuilder::size_limit.

It bears repeating: if you’re accepting untrusted patterns, it would be a good idea to start with conservative limits on m and n, and then carefully increase them as needed.

Structs§

  • CaptureLocations
    A low level representation of the byte offsets of each capture group.
  • CaptureMatches
    An iterator over all non-overlapping capture matches in a haystack.
  • CaptureNames
    An iterator over the names of all capture groups in a regex.
  • Captures
    Represents the capture groups for a single match.
  • Error
    An error that occurred during parsing or compiling a regular expression.
  • Match
    Represents a single match of a regex in a haystack.
  • Matches
    An iterator over all non-overlapping matches in a haystack.
  • NoExpand
    A helper type for forcing literal string replacement.
  • Regex
    A compiled regular expression for searching Unicode haystacks.
  • RegexBuilder
    A configurable builder for a Regex.
  • ReplacerRef
    A by-reference adaptor for a Replacer.
  • Split
    An iterator over all substrings delimited by a regex match.
  • SplitN
    An iterator over at most N substrings delimited by a regex match.
  • SubCaptureMatches
    An iterator over all group matches in a Captures value.

Traits§

  • Replacer
    A trait for types that can be used to replace matches in a haystack.

Functions§

  • escape
    Escapes all regular expression meta characters in pattern.