Regular expression match/search/replace support (both in IDE and in game)

[biyectivo]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Code (in-game) regex support: The problem is having to fumble with multiple string functions and cases when trying to do non-trivial parsing, matching and substitution of parts of strings efficiently.

IDE search/replace regex support: When searching large projects with global find/replace, it would greatly help to have the regex power to find more specific stuff.

Describe the solution you'd like

Code (in-game) regex support: I would implement a basic subset of what Python provides in the re package (https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html):

• string_regex_pos(regex, string, [regex_options_bitmask]) - regex equivalent to string_pos(), returns 0 if the string does not match the regex, or the position of the first character of the first regex match within the string. Similar to Python's re.search().
• Can also provide string_regex_pos_ext with an additional argument to provide the first position to start searching for matches
• string_regex_findall(regex, string, [regex_options_bitmask]) - Similar to Python's re.findall(), returns an array containing every match (if no capturing groups are found) or an array containing every capturing group.
• string_regex_split(regex, string, [remove_empty], [max_splits], [regex_options_bitmask]) - regex equivalent to string_split(), returns an array of the separated strings by the regex. Similar to Python's re.split().
• string_regex_replace(regex_find, regex_replace, string, [max_matches], [regex_options_bitmask]) - regex equivalent to string_replace() / string_replace_all(), replaces the occurrences of the regex pattern with the replacement regex. Similar to Pythons' re.sub().

IDE search/replace regex support: I love the way Notepad++ provides this, I would copy it, it allows for a basic text search/replace, an extended search/replace (being able to specify control characters) or a full-fledged regex search/replace:

Describe alternatives you've considered

Code: I've resorted to using a combination of available string functions, if statements and many other horrible hacks. I've also created a package that uses Samuel Venable's Execute Shell (libxprocess) to summon a compiled EXE program for each of the aforementioned functions, created in Python with re, on the background, sending it an input string and getting the result back to GM, but obviously this is horrendous per se, badly performing and not suitable for production projects.

IDE: if within a single script/object event/etc., I copy-paste the contents to Notepad++, perform the search (or search/replace) in Notepad++ then return it back to GM, which is horrible but works.

Additional context

Code: Nearly all modern languages have regex implemented. IDE: VSCode, Notepad++ and many other editors support this.

[Alphish]

I generally agree it would be good to get some regular expressions functionality in GameMaker. When it comes to naming the new functions, I'd suggest just using regex_* instead of string_regex_*, since there are no built-in functions that could be mistaken for regex, anyway.

[Mortisanti]

This would be so useful. I've been wanting it for a long time.

[yunzlp]

And string.match