Re: PCRE

[Sebastian Carlos]

> Work on this feature (pcre support in GNU sed) was
> never fully completed, and is currently shelved indefinitely.
>
> It would be inordinately difficult to make it as good as perl
> (especially with regard to multi-line processing),
> and would complicate sed while providing little gain (when
> perl itself is readily available).
>
> I'm thus closing and marking this item as 'wontfix'.
> However discussion can continue by replying to this thread.

I want to point out something that may have been missed at first:

Grep's PCRE support (grep -P) does not include the multi-line processing
features, Therefore I think that shouldn't be an impediment to implement
PCRE support in sed.

According to Grep manual, 2.4 "grep Programs":

> By default, grep applies each regexp to a line at a time, so the [PCRE]
‘(?s)’ directive (making ‘.’ match line breaks) is generally ineffective.