Previously, each pair of capturing parentheses gave rise to a separate
subre tree node, whose only function was to identify that we ought to
capture the match details for this particular sub-expression. In
most cases we don't really need that, since we can perfectly well
put a "capture this" annotation on the child node that does the real
matching work. As with the two preceding commits, the main value
of this is to avoid generating and optimizing an NFA for a tree node
that's not really pulling its weight.
The chosen data representation only allows one capture annotation
per subre node. In the legal-per-spec, but seemingly not very useful,
case where there are multiple capturing parens around the exact same
bit of the regex (i.e. "((xyz))"), wrap the child node in N-1 capture
nodes that act the same as before. We could work harder at that but
I'll refrain, pending some evidence that such cases are worth troubling
over.
In passing, improve the comments in regex.h to say what all the
different re_info bits mean. Some of them were pretty obvious
but others not so much, so reverse-engineer some documentation.
This is part of a patch series that in total reduces the regex engine's
runtime by about a factor of four on a large corpus of real-world regexes.
Patch by me, reviewed by Joel Jacobson
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1340281.1613018383@sss.pgh.pa.us
Instead of having left and right child links in subre structs,
have a single child link plus a sibling link. Multiple children
of a tree node are now reached by chasing the sibling chain.
The beneficiary of this is alternation tree nodes. A regular
expression with N (>1) branches is now represented by one alternation
node with N children, rather than a tree that includes N alternation
nodes as well as N children. While the old representation didn't
really cost anything extra at execution time, it was pretty horrid
for compilation purposes, because each of the alternation nodes had
its own NFA, which we were too stupid not to separately optimize.
(To make matters worse, all of those NFAs described the entire
alternation pattern, not just the portion of it that one might
expect from the tree structure.)
We continue to require concatenation nodes to have exactly two
children. This data structure is now prepared to support more,
but the executor's logic would need some careful redesign, and
it's not clear that a lot of benefit could be had.
This is part of a patch series that in total reduces the regex engine's
runtime by about a factor of four on a large corpus of real-world regexes.
Patch by me, reviewed by Joel Jacobson
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1340281.1613018383@sss.pgh.pa.us
Push some hopefully-uncontroversial bits extracted from an upcoming
patch series, to remove non-relevant clutter from the main patches.
In compact(), return immediately after setting REG_ASSERT error;
continuing the loop would just lead to assertion failure below.
(Ask me how I know.)
In parseqatom(), remove assertion that moresubs() did its job.
When moresubs actually did its job, this is redundant with that
function's final assert; but when it failed on OOM, this is an
assertion crash. We could avoid the crash by adding a NOERR()
check before the assertion, but it seems better to subtract code
than add it. (Note that there's a NOERR exit a few lines further
down, and nothing else between here and there requires moresubs
to have succeeded. So we don't really need an extra error exit.)
This is a live bug in assert-enabled builds, but given the very
low likelihood of OOM in moresub's tiny allocation, I don't think
it's worth back-patching.
On the other hand, it seems worthwhile to add an assertion that
our intended v->subs[subno] target is still null by the time we
are ready to insert into it, since there's a recursion in between.
In pg_regexec, ensure we fflush any debug output on the way out,
and try to make MDEBUG messages more uniform and helpful. (In
particular, ensure that all of them are prefixed with the subre's
id number, so one can match up entry and exit reports.)
Add some test cases in test_regex to improve coverage of lookahead
and lookbehind constraints. Adding these now is mainly to establish
that this is indeed the existing behavior.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1340281.1613018383@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
The new indent version includes numerous fixes thanks to Piotr Stefaniak.
The main changes visible in this commit are:
* Nicer formatting of function-pointer declarations.
* No longer unexpectedly removes spaces in expressions using casts,
sizeof, or offsetof.
* No longer wants to add a space in "struct structname *varname", as
well as some similar cases for const- or volatile-qualified pointers.
* Declarations using PG_USED_FOR_ASSERTS_ONLY are formatted more nicely.
* Fixes bug where comments following declarations were sometimes placed
with no space separating them from the code.
* Fixes some odd decisions for comments following case labels.
* Fixes some cases where comments following code were indented to less
than the expected column 33.
On the less good side, it now tends to put more whitespace around typedef
names that are not listed in typedefs.list. This might encourage us to
put more effort into typedef name collection; it's not really a bug in
indent itself.
There are more changes coming after this round, having to do with comment
indentation and alignment of lines appearing within parentheses. I wanted
to limit the size of the diffs to something that could be reviewed without
one's eyes completely glazing over, so it seemed better to split up the
changes as much as practical.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
pcolor was used to represent function arguments that are nominally of
type color, but when using a pre-ANSI C compiler would be passed as the
promoted integer type. We really don't need that anymore.
A lookbehind constraint is like a lookahead constraint in that it consumes
no text; but it checks for existence (or nonexistence) of a match *ending*
at the current point in the string, rather than one *starting* at the
current point. This is a long-requested feature since it exists in many
other regex libraries, but Henry Spencer had never got around to
implementing it in the code we use.
Just making it work is actually pretty trivial; but naive copying of the
logic for lookahead constraints leads to code that often spends O(N^2) time
to scan an N-character string, because we have to run the match engine
from string start to the current probe point each time the constraint is
checked. In typical use-cases a lookbehind constraint will be written at
the start of the regex and hence will need to be checked at every character
--- so O(N^2) work overall. To fix that, I introduced a third copy of the
core DFA matching loop, paralleling the existing longest() and shortest()
loops. This version, matchuntil(), can suspend and resume matching given
a couple of pointers' worth of storage space. So we need only run it
across the string once, stopping at each interesting probe point and then
resuming to advance to the next one.
I also put in an optimization that simplifies one-character lookahead and
lookbehind constraints, such as "(?=x)" or "(?<!\w)", into AHEAD and BEHIND
constraints, which already existed in the engine. This avoids the overhead
of the LACON machinery entirely for these rather common cases.
The net result is that lookbehind constraints run a factor of three or so
slower than Perl's for multi-character constraints, but faster than Perl's
for one-character constraints ... and they work fine for variable-length
constraints, which Perl gives up on entirely. So that's not bad from a
competitive perspective, and there's room for further optimization if
anyone cares. (In reality, raw scan rate across a large input string is
probably not that big a deal for Postgres usage anyway; so I'm happy if
it's linear.)
Some of the functions in regex compilation and execution recurse, and
therefore could in principle be driven to stack overflow. The Tcl crew
has seen this happen in practice in duptraverse(), though their fix was
to put in a hard-wired limit on the number of recursive levels, which is
not too appetizing --- fortunately, we have enough infrastructure to check
the actually available stack. Greg Stark has also seen it in other places
while fuzz testing on a machine with limited stack space. Let's put guards
in to prevent crashes in all these places.
Since the regex code would leak memory if we simply threw elog(ERROR),
we have to introduce an API that checks for stack depth without throwing
such an error. Fortunately that's not difficult.
In cfindloop(), if the initial call to shortest() reports that a
zero-length match is possible at the current search start point, but then
it is unable to construct any actual match to that, it'll just loop around
with the same start point, and thus make no progress. We need to force the
start point to be advanced. This is safe because the loop over "begin"
points has already tried and failed to match starting at "close", so there
is surely no need to try that again.
This bug was introduced in commit e2bd904955,
wherein we allowed continued searching after we'd run out of match
possibilities, but evidently failed to think hard enough about exactly
where we needed to search next.
Because of the way this code works, such a match failure is only possible
in the presence of backrefs --- otherwise, shortest()'s judgment that a
match is possible should always be correct. That probably explains how
come the bug has escaped detection for several years.
The actual fix is a one-liner, but I took the trouble to add/improve some
comments related to the loop logic.
After fixing that, the submitted test case "()*\1" didn't loop anymore.
But it reported failure, though it seems like it ought to match a
zero-length string; both Tcl and Perl think it does. That seems to be from
overenthusiastic optimization on my part when I rewrote the iteration match
logic in commit 173e29aa5deefd9e71c183583ba37805c8102a72: we can't just
"declare victory" for a zero-length match without bothering to set match
data for capturing parens inside the iterator node.
Per fuzz testing by Greg Stark. The first part of this is a bug in all
supported branches, and the second part is a bug since 9.2 where the
iteration rewrite happened.
Commit 9662143f0c added infrastructure to
allow regular-expression operations to be terminated early in the event
of SIGINT etc. However, fuzz testing by Greg Stark disclosed that there
are still cases where regex compilation could run for a long time without
noticing a cancel request. Specifically, the fixempties() phase never
adds new states, only new arcs, so it doesn't hit the cancel check I'd put
in newstate(). Add one to newarc() as well to cover that.
Some experimentation of my own found that regex execution could also run
for a long time despite a pending cancel. We'd put a high-level cancel
check into cdissect(), but there was none inside the core text-matching
routines longest() and shortest(). Ordinarily those inner loops are very
very fast ... but in the presence of lookahead constraints, not so much.
As a compromise, stick a cancel check into the stateset cache-miss
function, which is enough to guarantee a cancel check at least once per
lookahead constraint test.
Making this work required more attention to error handling throughout the
regex executor. Henry Spencer had apparently originally intended longest()
and shortest() to be incapable of incurring errors while running, so
neither they nor their subroutines had well-defined error reporting
behaviors. However, that was already broken by the lookahead constraint
feature, since lacon() can surely suffer an out-of-memory failure ---
which, in the code as it stood, might never be reported to the user at all,
but just silently be treated as a non-match of the lookahead constraint.
Normalize all that by inserting explicit error tests as needed. I took the
opportunity to add some more comments to the code, too.
Back-patch to all supported branches, like the previous patch.
After an internal failure in shortest() or longest() while pinning down the
exact location of a match, find() forgot to free the DFA structure before
returning. This is pretty unlikely to occur, since we just successfully
ran the "search" variant of the DFA; but it could happen, and it would
result in a session-lifespan memory leak since this code uses malloc()
directly. Problem seems to have been aboriginal in Spencer's library,
so back-patch all the way.
In passing, correct a thinko in a comment I added awhile back about the
meaning of the "ntree" field.
I happened across these issues while comparing our code to Tcl's version
of the library.
Sync our regex code with upstream changes since last time we did this,
which was Tcl 8.5.11 (see commit 08fd6ff37f).
The only functional change here is to disbelieve that an octal escape is
three digits long if it would exceed \377. That's a bug fix, but it's
a minor one and could change the interpretation of working regexes, so
don't back-patch.
In addition to that, s/INFINITY/DUPINF/ to eliminate the risk of collisions
with <math.h>'s macro, and s/LOCAL/NOPROP/ because that also seems like
an unnecessarily collision-prone macro name.
There were some other cosmetic changes in their copy that I did not adopt,
notably a rather half-hearted attempt at renaming some of the C functions
in a more verbose style. (I'm not necessarily against the concept, but
renaming just a few functions in the package is not an improvement.)
When the number of allowed iterations is limited (either a "?" quantifier
or a bound expression), the last sub-match has to reach to the end of the
target string. The previous coding here first tried the shortest possible
match (one character, usually) and then gave up and back-tracked if that
didn't work, typically leading to failure to match overall, as shown in
bug #11478 from Christoph Berg. The minimum change to fix that would be to
not decrement k before "goto backtrack"; but that would be a pretty stupid
solution, because we'd laboriously try each possible sub-match length
before finally discovering that only ending at the end can work. Instead,
force the sub-match endpoint limit up to the end for even the first
shortest() call if we cannot have any more sub-matches after this one.
Bug introduced in my rewrite that added the iterdissect logic, commit
173e29aa5d. The shortest-first search code
was too closely modeled on the longest-first code, which hasn't got this
issue since it tries a match reaching to the end to start with anyway.
Back-patch to all affected branches.
For a regex containing backrefs, pg_regexec() might fail to free all the
sub-DFAs that were created during execution, resulting in a permanent
(session lifespan) memory leak. Problem was introduced by me in commit
587359479a. Per report from Sandro Santilli;
diagnosis by Greg Stark.
The regex code didn't have any provision for query cancel; which is
unsurprising given its non-Postgres origin, but still problematic since
some operations can take a long time. Introduce a callback function to
check for a pending query cancel or session termination request, and
call it in a couple of strategic spots where we can make the regex code
exit with an error indicator.
If we ever actually split out the regex code as a standalone library,
some additional work will be needed to let the cancel callback function
be specified externally to the library. But that's straightforward
(certainly so by comparison to putting the locale-dependent character
classification logic on a similar arms-length basis), and there seems
no need to do it right now.
A bigger issue is that there may be more places than these two where
we need to check for cancels. We can always add more checks later,
now that the infrastructure is in place.
Since there are known examples of not-terribly-long regexes that can
lock up a backend for a long time, back-patch to all supported branches.
I have hopes of fixing the known performance problems later, but adding
query cancel ability seems like a good idea even if they were all fixed.
An ancient logic error in cfindloop() could cause the regex engine to fail
to find matches that begin later than the start of the string. This
function is only used when the regex pattern contains a back reference,
and so far as we can tell the error is only reachable if the pattern is
non-greedy (i.e. its first quantifier uses the ? modifier). Furthermore,
the actual match must begin after some potential match that satisfies the
DFA but then fails the back-reference's match test.
Reported and fixed by Jeevan Chalke, with cosmetic adjustments by me.
zaptreesubs() was coded to unconditionally reset a capture subre's
corresponding pmatch[] entry. However, in regexes without backrefs, that
array is caller-supplied and might not have as many entries as the regex
has capturing parens. So check the array length and do nothing if there
is no corresponding entry, much as subset() does. Failure to check this
resulted in a stack clobber in the case reported by Marko Kreen.
This bug appears to have been latent in the regex library from the
beginning. It was not exposed because find() called dissect() not
cdissect(), and the dissect() code path didn't ever call zaptreesubs()
(formerly zapmem()). When I unified dissect() and cdissect() in commit
4dd78bf37a, the problem was exposed.
Now that I've seen this, I'm rather suspicious that we might need to
back-patch it; but will refrain for now, for lack of evidence that
the case can be hit in the previous coding.
The "uncomplicated" case isn't materially less complicated than the full
case, certainly not enough so to justify duplicating nearly 500 lines
of code. The only extra work being done in the full path is zaptreesubs,
which is very cheap compared to everything else being done here, and
besides that I'm less than convinced that it's not needed in some cases
even without backrefs.
In nested sub-regex trees, lower-level nodes created DFAs and then
destroyed them again before exiting, which is a bit dumb considering that
the recursive search is likely to call those nodes again later. Instead
cache each created DFA until the end of pg_regexec(). This is basically a
space for time tradeoff, in that it might increase the maximum memory
usage. However, in most regex patterns there are not all that many subre
nodes, so not that many DFAs --- and in any case, the peak usage occurs
when reaching the bottom recursion level, and except for alternation cases
that's going to be the same anyway.
Apparently some primordial version of Spencer's engine needed cdissect()
and child functions to be able to continue matching from a previous
position when re-called. That is dead code, though, since trivial
inspection shows that cdissect can never be entered without having
previously done zapmem which resets the relevant retry counter. I have
also verified experimentally that no case in the Tcl regression tests
reaches cdissect with a nonzero retry value. Accordingly, remove that
logic. This doesn't really save any noticeable number of cycles in itself,
but it is one step towards making dissect() and cdissect() equivalent,
which will allow removing hundreds of lines of near-duplicated code.
Since struct subre's "retry" field is no longer particularly related to
any kind of retry, rename it to "id". As of this commit it's only used
for identifying a subre node in debug printouts, so you might think we
should get rid of the field entirely; but I have a plan for another use.
Cases where a back-reference is part of a larger subexpression that
is quantified have never worked in Spencer's regex engine, because
he used a compile-time transformation that neglected the need to
check the back-reference match in iterations before the last one.
(That was okay for capturing parens, and we still do it if the
regex has *only* capturing parens ... but it's not okay for backrefs.)
To make this work properly, we have to add an "iteration" node type
to the regex engine's vocabulary of sub-regex nodes. Since this is a
moderately large change with a fair risk of introducing new bugs of its
own, apply to HEAD only, even though it's a fix for a longstanding bug.
The syntax "\n*", that is a backref with a * quantifier directly applied
to it, has never worked correctly in Spencer's library. This has been an
open bug in the Tcl bug tracker since 2005:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1115587&group_id=10894&atid=110894
The core of the problem is in parseqatom(), which first changes "\n*" to
"\n+|" and then applies repeat() to the NFA representing the backref atom.
repeat() thinks that any arc leading into its "rp" argument is part of the
sub-NFA to be repeated. Unfortunately, since parseqatom() already created
the arc that was intended to represent the empty bypass around "\n+", this
arc gets moved too, so that it now leads into the state loop created by
repeat(). Thus, what was supposed to be an "empty" bypass gets turned into
something that represents zero or more repetitions of the NFA representing
the backref atom. In the original example, in place of
^([bc])\1*$
we now have something that acts like
^([bc])(\1+|[bc]*)$
At runtime, the branch involving the actual backref fails, as it's supposed
to, but then the other branch succeeds anyway.
We could no doubt fix this by some rearrangement of the operations in
parseqatom(), but that code is plenty ugly already, and what's more the
whole business of converting "x*" to "x+|" probably needs to go away to fix
another problem I'll mention in a moment. Instead, this patch suppresses
the *-conversion when the target is a simple backref atom, leaving the case
of m == 0 to be handled at runtime. This makes the patch in regcomp.c a
one-liner, at the cost of having to tweak cbrdissect() a little. In the
event I went a bit further than that and rewrote cbrdissect() to check all
the string-length-related conditions before it starts comparing characters.
It seems a bit stupid to possibly iterate through many copies of an
n-character backreference, only to fail at the end because the target
string's length isn't a multiple of n --- we could have found that out
before starting. The existing coding could only be a win if integer
division is hugely expensive compared to character comparison, but I don't
know of any modern machine where that might be true.
This does not fix all the problems with quantified back-references. In
particular, the code is still broken for back-references that appear within
a larger expression that is quantified (so that direct insertion of the
quantification limits into the BACKREF node doesn't apply). I think fixing
that will take some major surgery on the NFA code, specifically introducing
an explicit iteration node type instead of trying to transform iteration
into concatenation of modified regexps.
Back-patch to all supported branches. In HEAD, also add a regression test
case for this. (It may seem a bit silly to create a regression test file
for just one test case; but I'm expecting that we will soon import a whole
bunch of regex regression tests from Tcl, so might as well create the
infrastructure now.)
Sync our regex code with upstream changes since last time we did this,
which was Tcl 8.5.0 (see commit df1e965e12).
There are no functional changes here; the main point is just to lay down
a commit-log marker that somebody has looked at this recently, and to do
what we can to keep the two codebases comparable.
This involves getting the character classification and case-folding
functions in the regex library to use the collations infrastructure.
Most of this work had been done already in connection with the upper/lower
and LIKE logic, so it was a simple matter of transposition.
While at it, split out these functions into a separate source file
regc_pg_locale.c, so that they can be correctly labeled with the Postgres
project's license rather than the Scriptics license. These functions are
100% Postgres-written code whereas what remains in regc_locale.c is still
mostly not ours, so lumping them both under the same copyright notice was
getting more and more misleading.
from "clang". The VERR changes make an assignment unconditional, which is
probably easier to read/understand anyway, and one can hardly argue that
it's worth shaving cycles off the case of reporting another error when
one has already been detected. The INSIST change limits where that macro
can be used, but not in a way that creates a problem for any existing call.
matching before recursing instead of after. The DFA match eliminates
unworkable midpoint choices a lot faster than the recursive check, in most
cases, so doing it first can speed things up; particularly in pathological
cases such as recently exhibited by Michael Glaesemann.
In addition, apply some cosmetic changes that were applied upstream (in the
Tcl project) at the same time, in order to sync with upstream version 1.15
of regexec.c.
Upstream apparently intends to backpatch this, so I will too. The
pathological behavior could be unpleasant if encountered in the field,
which seems to justify any risk of introducing new bugs.
Tom Lane, reviewed by Donal K. Fellows of Tcl project
The specification of this function is as follows.
regexp_replace(source text, pattern text, replacement text, [flags
text])
returns text
Replace string that matches to regular expression in source text to
replacement text.
- pattern is regular expression pattern.
- replacement is replace string that can use '\1'-'\9', and '\&'.
'\1'-'\9': back reference to the n'th subexpression.
'\&' : entire matched string.
- flags can use the following values:
g: global (replace all)
i: ignore case
When the flags is not specified, case sensitive, replace the first
instance only.
Atsushi Ogawa
(extracted from Tcl 8.4.1 release, as Henry still hasn't got round to
making it a separate library). This solves a performance problem for
multibyte, as well as upgrading our regexp support to match recent Tcl
and nearly match recent Perl.
postgres.h or c.h includes a system header (such as stdio.h or
stdlib.h), there's no need to specifically include it in any of the .c
files in the backend.
Neil Conway
Implement SQL99 SIMILAR TO as a synonym for our existing operator "~".
Implement SQL99 regular expression SUBSTRING(string FROM pat FOR escape).
Extend the definition to make the FOR clause optional.
Define textregexsubstr() to actually implement this feature.
Update the regression test to include these new string features.
All tests pass.
Rename the regular expression support routines from "pg95_xxx" to "pg_xxx".
Define CREATE CHARACTER SET in the parser per SQL99. No implementation yet.
definitions from K&R to ANSI C style, and fix broken assumption that
int and long are the same datatype. This repairs problems observed
on Alpha with regexps having between 32 and 63 states.
Included are patches intended for allowing PostgreSQL to handle
multi-byte charachter sets such as EUC(Extende Unix Code), Unicode and
Mule internal code. With the MB patch you can use multi-byte character
sets in regexp and LIKE. The encoding system chosen is determined at
the compile time.
To enable the MB extension, you need to define a variable "MB" in
Makefile.global or in Makefile.custom. For further information please
take a look at README.mb under doc directory.
(Note that unlike "jp patch" I do not use modified GNU regexp any
more. I changed Henry Spencer's regexp coming with PostgreSQL.)
Tom Lane