andreasvc / pyre2

Python wrapper for RE2
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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=============================================================== pyre2: Python RE2 wrapper for linear-time regular expressions

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.. contents:: Table of Contents :depth: 2 :backlinks: top

Summary

pyre2 is a Python extension that wraps Google's RE2 regular expression library <https://github.com/google/re2>_. The RE2 engine compiles (strictly) regular expressions to deterministic finite automata, which guarantees linear-time behavior.

Intended as a drop-in replacement for re. Unicode is supported by encoding to UTF-8, and bytes strings are treated as UTF-8 when the UNICODE flag is given. For best performance, work with UTF-8 encoded bytes strings.

Installation

Normal usage for Linux/Mac/Windows::

$ pip install pyre2

Compiling from source

Requirements for building the C++ extension from the repo source:

On MacOS, use the brew package manager::

$ brew install -s re2 pybind11

On Windows use the vcpkg package manager::

$ vcpkg install re2:x64-windows pybind11:x64-windows

You can pass some cmake environment variables to alter the build type or pass a toolchain file (the latter is required on Windows) or specify the cmake generator. For example::

$ CMAKE_GENERATOR="Unix Makefiles" CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=clang_toolchain.cmake tox -e deploy

For development, get the source::

$ git clone git://github.com/andreasvc/pyre2.git
$ cd pyre2
$ make install

Platform-agnostic building with conda

An alternative to the above is provided via the conda recipe (use the miniconda installer if you don't have conda installed already).

.. _conda: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/pyre2 .. _miniconda installer: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html

Backwards Compatibility

The stated goal of this module is to be a drop-in replacement for re, i.e.::

try:
    import re2 as re
except ImportError:
    import re

That being said, there are features of the re module that this module may never have; these will be handled through fallback to the original re module:

On the other hand, unicode character classes are supported (e.g., \p{Greek}). Syntax reference: https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/Syntax

However, there are times when you may want to be notified of a failover. The function set_fallback_notification determines the behavior in these cases::

try:
    import re2 as re
except ImportError:
    import re
else:
    re.set_fallback_notification(re.FALLBACK_WARNING)

set_fallback_notification takes three values: re.FALLBACK_QUIETLY (default), re.FALLBACK_WARNING (raise a warning), and re.FALLBACK_EXCEPTION (raise an exception).

Documentation

Consult the docstrings in the source code or interactively through ipython or pydoc re2 etc.

Unicode Support

Python bytes and unicode strings are fully supported, but note that RE2 works with UTF-8 encoded strings under the hood, which means that unicode strings need to be encoded and decoded back and forth. There are two important factors:

To avoid the overhead of encoding and decoding to UTF-8, it is possible to pass UTF-8 encoded bytes strings directly but still treat them as unicode::

In [18]: re2.findall(u'\w'.encode('utf8'), u'Mötley Crüe'.encode('utf8'), flags=re2.UNICODE)
Out[18]: ['M', '\xc3\xb6', 't', 'l', 'e', 'y', 'C', 'r', '\xc3\xbc', 'e']
In [19]: re2.findall(u'\w'.encode('utf8'), u'Mötley Crüe'.encode('utf8'))
Out[19]: ['M', 't', 'l', 'e', 'y', 'C', 'r', 'e']

However, note that the indices in Match objects will refer to the bytes string. The indices of the match in the unicode string could be computed by decoding/encoding, but this is done automatically and more efficiently if you pass the unicode string::

>>> re2.search(u'ü'.encode('utf8'), u'Mötley Crüe'.encode('utf8'), flags=re2.UNICODE)
<re2.Match object; span=(10, 12), match='\xc3\xbc'>
>>> re2.search(u'ü', u'Mötley Crüe', flags=re2.UNICODE)
<re2.Match object; span=(9, 10), match=u'\xfc'>

Finally, if you want to match bytes without regard for Unicode characters, pass bytes strings and leave out the UNICODE flag (this will cause Latin 1 encoding to be used with RE2 under the hood)::

>>> re2.findall(br'.', b'\x80\x81\x82')
['\x80', '\x81', '\x82']

Performance

Performance is of course the point of this module, so it better perform well. Regular expressions vary widely in complexity, and the salient feature of RE2 is that it behaves well asymptotically. This being said, for very simple substitutions, I've found that occasionally python's regular re module is actually slightly faster. However, when the re module gets slow, it gets really slow, while this module buzzes along.

In the below example, I'm running the data against 8MB of text from the colossal Wikipedia XML file. I'm running them multiple times, being careful to use the timeit module. To see more details, please see the performance script <http://github.com/andreasvc/pyre2/tree/master/tests/performance.py>_.

+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------+ |Test |Description |# total runs|re time(s)|re2 time(s)|% re time|regex time(s)|% regex time| +=================+===========================================================================+============+==============+===============+=============+=================+================+ |Findall URI|Email|Find list of '([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9])://([^ /]+)(/[^ ])?|([^ @]+)@([^ @]+)'|2 |6.262 |0.131 |2.08% |5.119 |2.55% | +-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------+ |Replace WikiLinks|This test replaces links of the form [[Obama|Barack_Obama]] to Obama. |100 |4.374 |0.815 |18.63% |1.176 |69.33% | +-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------+ |Remove WikiLinks |This test splits the data by the tag. |100 |4.153 |0.225 |5.43% |0.537 |42.01% | +-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------+

Feel free to add more speed tests to the bottom of the script and send a pull request my way!

Current Status

The tests show the following differences with Python's re module:

Please report any further issues with pyre2.

Tests

If you would like to help, one thing that would be very useful is writing comprehensive tests for this. It's actually really easy:

Credits

This code builds on the following projects (in chronological order):