PCRE2Project/pcre2

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1362 stars · 287 forks observed · 2026-09-25

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

PCRE2 is a self-contained C library implementing Perl-compatible regular expression pattern matching, with Unicode support and an optional high-performance JIT engine. It is portable, easy to embed, and widely bundled in products like Apache, Git, Safari, PHP, and R.

Use cases

• add perl-compatible regex matching to a C or C++ application
• embed a fast regex engine in another language runtime
• match Unicode text with regular expressions
• speed up regex-heavy workloads with a JIT compiler
• replace a platform's limited regex library with a full-featured one

When to choose

• you need Perl-compatible regex semantics in a C/C++ project
• you need Unicode support and multiple character encodings
• you need a mature, portable, permissively licensed (BSD) regex library
• regex performance is critical and JIT compilation helps

When to avoid

• you only need simple regexes available in your language's standard library
• you want a higher-level regex API in a scripting language rather than C
• you need a regex engine with linear-time guarantees like RE2

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser developer-tools parsers developer-tools programming-languages windows cross-platform c regex regular-expressions pcre unicode jit c-library embeddable linux macos

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