From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Mark Dilger <mark.dilger@enterprisedb.com>
cc: "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Test harness for regex code (to allow importing Tcl's test suite)
In-reply-to: <00A426B2-983A-4996-AF66-C9511B88FFC3@enterprisedb.com>
References: <2873268.1609732164@sss.pgh.pa.us>
 <00A426B2-983A-4996-AF66-C9511B88FFC3@enterprisedb.com>
Comments: In-reply-to Mark Dilger <mark.dilger@enterprisedb.com>
	message dated "Sun, 03 Jan 2021 21:37:41 -0800"
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Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:47:16 -0500
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Mark Dilger <mark.dilger@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> Have you thought about whether If it weren't in test/modules, it might b=
e nice to expose test_regex from SQL with a slightly different interface t=
hat doesn't throw on regex compilation error?  Maybe something in contrib?=
  It might be useful to some users to validate regular expressions.  I'm j=
ust asking... I don't have any problem with how you have it here.

Hm.  There isn't anything about test_regex()'s API that I would want
to expose to end users ;-) ... it's just designed to replicate the
test API that Henry Spencer designed a couple decades ago, which IMO
was not too clean even by the standards of the time.

However, I can see the argument for a function along the lines of
"validate_regex(text) returns bool".  If you or somebody else wants to
write that, independently of this patch, I think it'd be a fine idea.

			regards, tom lane