[sword-devel] Comming soon: new improved sword searching

[Chris Little]

On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Jerry Hastings wrote:

> At 12:48 AM 9/9/2002 +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> 
> >All verses containing two or more of God, Good or Greed: (g[ore]*d){2,}
> 
> I don't believe that gives the desired result. At least not in BibleCS. I 
> don't know if that is a front end issue or a lib issue. In the past I have 
> found that parentheses do not work as expected, if at all. I have not 
> looked at this for some time though. If someone can show me that they do 
> work, I will document these advanced features in the BibleCS helps.

FWIW, we need to upgrade our regexp engine.  The current one (from GNU) 
has a couple of problems that I was aware of.  First it is GPL--this is 
the last GPL component in the library.  If it were replaced with something 
else, we could license Sword under non-GPL licenses to other entities 
(e.g. Bible societies that don't want to deal with GPL's restrictions) or 
put it out publicly under a license that we write that better meets our 
needs than the GPL.  Second (and probably more immediately important) it 
doesn't handle UTF-8.

Perl Regexp fixes both of these problems.  We can use it under the
Artistic License & it's got nice UTF-8 support built in.  I nominate
switching to this as a .5 priority. :)

If there are other quirks in the GNU Regexp implementation like you
mention, we can pray that Perl Regexp fixes those also.

--Chris