[Issue 5169] New: Add(?:) Non-capturing parentheses group support to std.regex

[d-bugmail at puremagic.com]

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5169

           Summary: Add(?:) Non-capturing parentheses group support to
                    std.regex
           Product: D
           Version: D2
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P2
         Component: Phobos
        AssignedTo: nobody at puremagic.com
        ReportedBy: dmitry.olsh at gmail.com


--- Comment #0 from Dmitry Olshansky <dmitry.olsh at gmail.com> 2010-11-05 09:35:15 PDT ---
Intro: Non-capturing parentheses group the regex so you can apply regex
operators, but do not capture anything and do not create backreferences. 

Examples:
//A very dumb example, matches abcabcabc, no backrefs created
(?:abc){3} 
//A decent attempt to snatch href field of <a> html tag, without unnessary
//backrefs:
<(?:a|A)(?:[^<>]*)href *= *"?([^"<> ]*)"?(?:[^<>]*)> 

Rationale: ECMA262 standart mentioned on
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/std_regex.html
requires support of such construct. Sooner or later we should get rid of 
"however, some of the very advanced forms may behave slightly differently",
also given the fact that sometimes it's simple. See attached patch.

Backtracking is also costly, see benchmark code/results
 (uses the proposed patch):
//===bench.d===
import std.regex, std.stdio,std.datetime;

void main(){
    auto r1 = regex(`(?:a|A)(?:[^<>]*)href *= *"?([^"<> ]*)"?(?:[^<>]*)>`,"g"); 
    auto r2 = regex(`(a|A)([^<>]*)href *= *"?([^"<> ]*)"?([^<>]*)>`,"g"); 
    void nobackref(){
        match(`<a href = http://www.google.com  id="G"/>`,r1).hit;
    }
    void backref(){
        match(`<a href = http://www.google.com  id="G"/>`,r2).hit;
    }
    auto bench = benchmark!(nobackref,backref)(1_000);
    writeln("No backref:   ",bench[0].milliseconds);
    writeln("With backref: ",bench[1].milliseconds);
}
//======
Results on my machine, min .. max of 10
No backref:   256.955 .. 267.341
With backref: 580.636 .. 587.187

P.S. I have rebuilt phobos (on Windows), and run unitestes, output:
C:\dmd2\src\phobos>unittest.exe
 --- std.socket(660) broken test ---
 (std.socket.HostException: Address family mismatch)
9abc5a5a12345678
args.length = 1
args[0] = 'C:\dmd2\src\phobos\unittest.exe~T'
Vendor string:    AuthenticAMD
Processor string: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 940 Processor
Signature:        Family=16 Model=4 Stepping=2
Features:         MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SSE3 3DNow! 3DNow!+ MMX+ AMD64 HTT
Multithreading:   4 threads / 4 cores

Success!

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