pyre2

Contents

• Summary
• Backwards Compatibility
• Installation
• Documentation
• Unicode Support
• Performance
• Current Status
• Tests
• Credits

Summary

pyre2 is a Python extension that wraps Google's RE2 regular expression library. 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.

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``:

• lookahead assertions (?!...)
• backreferences (\\n in search pattern)
• W and S not supported inside character classes

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).

Installation

Prerequisites:

• The re2 library from Google
• The Python development headers (e.g. sudo apt-get install python-dev)
• A build environment with gcc or clang (e.g. sudo apt-get install build-essential)
• Cython 0.20+ (pip install cython)

After the prerequisites are installed, install as follows (pip3 for python3):

$ pip install https://github.com/andreasvc/pyre2/archive/master.zip

For development, get the source:

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

(or make install3 for Python 3)

Documentation

Consult the docstring 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:

• whether a unicode pattern and search string is used (will be encoded to UTF-8 internally)
• the UNICODE flag: whether operators such as \w recognize Unicode characters.

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.

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 <page> 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:

• The $ operator in Python's re matches twice if the string ends with \n. This can be simulated using \n?$, except when doing substitutions.
• pyre2 and Python's re behave differently with nested and empty groups; pyre2 will return an empty string in cases where Python would return None for a group that did not participate in a match.

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:

• Come up with regular expression problems using the regular python 're' module.
• Write a session in python traceback format Example.
• Replace your import re with import re2 as re.
• Save it as a .txt file in the tests directory. You can comment on it however you like and indent the code with 4 spaces.

Credits

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

• Google's RE2 regular expression library: https://github.com/google/re2
• Facebook's pyre2 github repository: http://github.com/facebook/pyre2/
• Mike Axiak's Cython version of this: http://github.com/axiak/pyre2/ (seems not actively maintained)
• This fork adds Python 3 support and other improvements.