GNU regular expression packages

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

Hi,

there are two RE packages under LGPL that I'm aware of, gnu.regexp and
gnu.rex.

I've implemented the RegexpMatcher interface for gnu.regexp and put it
up at jakarta.apache.org/~bodewig/. It seems to work fairly well, but
I had to drop one testcase - [0-9]* is not matched by the empty string
according to gnu.regexp.

gnu.rex is a fairly different beast. I've started to implement the
interface but (1) it doesn't work very well (it seems to ignore the $
anchor for end of the line/string) and (2) can be easily led to fail
with some internal IndexOutOfBoundsExceptions. If anybody wants to
build up on what I have, contact me.

I've not added any license to the files - consider them to be in the
public domain for the moment - and wouldn't feel too well adding them
to the Ant repository. I have seen too many different opinions on LGPL
and Java lately, ranging from "it's OK to use but not modify the code"
to "LGPL is effectively GPL for Java, you cannot invoke anything
directly but have to go through reflection for everything".

Given that IANAL I don't want to touch this issue.

Stefan