Erlang NIF bindings for the RE2 regex library

Using re2

The library's API follows the standard Erlang/OTP re API as closely as possible while accounting for the differences in RE2. One notable difference is that there's no run/{2,3} but only match/{2,3} as in the C++ API. It would be easy to add run/{2,3}, if that's needed.

Obtaining re2

Installation via package manager

To use re2, you can add it as a project dependency and let your package manager of choice handle it:

rebar.config: {re2, "1.*"}

erlang.mk: DEPS = re2

mix.exs: {:re2, "~> 1.*"}

Installation from source into `$ERL_LIBS`

If you want to make re2 available globally, you can install it from source into your Erlang installation by adding it in one of your $ERL_LIBS paths. So, it's either somewhere like /usr/local/lib/lib/erlang/lib or $HOME/.erl.

You can either download a tagged release from https://github.com/tuncer/re2/releases and extract that or clone the git repo https://github.com/tuncer/re2 in the target directory. Once that's done, cd into the directory and run rebar compile or just make.

Now, if you start erl, you should be able to call functions from the re2 module.

$ erl
1> code:which(re2).
"/usr/local/lib/erlang/lib/re2/ebin/re2.beam"
2>

Advanced build time options

If RE2 is found on the system, it will be used. Otherwise, the RE2 dependency is automatically downloaded to c_src/re2 by the build script. If you prefer to link against RE2 as found on the system, you can set the env var SYSTEM_RE2=1. If you set SYSTEM_RE2=1 and the library can not be found, it will fall back to a local copy, as if you didn't use the env var. If you want to override the RE2 version that is fetched and built, when not using system RE2, you can do so by setting RE2_REV to a git rev.