fastre 0.2.0

A Lightning Fast ⚡ Rust-based regex crate wrapper for Python3 to get faster performance. 👾

fastre: A fast Python Regex Engine with support for fancy features

🚀 Supercharge your Python regex with Rust-powered performance!

🌟 Why fastre ?

fastre is a powerful Python library that wraps the blazing-fast Rust fancy-regex crate, bringing enhanced speed to your regular expression operations. It's designed to be a drop-in replacement for Python's native re module, with some minor syntax differences.

fastre is based on a fork of an earlier implementation called flpc. Whilst flpc offered good performance it was based on a rust create which didn't support features such as lookarouds. As such there were many instances where it couldn't be used a drop in replacement for the python re module. It also renamed the match function fmatch, and didn't implement some methods on the Match and Pattern objects.

fastre takes a different approach and uses the rust based fancy-regex create. Which means that fastre supports features such as back referencing and lookarounds. One of the key features is that if a regex is considered to be simple then the function will be delegated to the rust based regex crate which performs operations in constant time.

If a fancy feature is used then an alternative approach is employed based on parsing the regex, building an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and then compiling this into a using an implemention of a Virtual Machine to execute the progam.

🚀 Quick Start

1. Install fastre:

   pip install fastre
   

2. Use it in your code as shown in the API

🔧 API

fastre mirrors the re module's API, with a few small exceptions:

• When using group() on a match object, always provide an index (e.g., group(0) for the entire match)

Common functions include:

• compile()
• search()
• findall()
• finditer()
• split()
• sub()
• subn()

💡 Pro Tips

• Pre-compile your patterns for faster execution
• Use raw strings (r'') for cleaner regex patterns
• Always check if a match is found before accessing groups
• Remember to use group(0) to get the entire match

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Whether it's bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions, please feel free to reach out. Check our contribution guidelines to get started.

📄 License

fastre is open-source software licensed under the MIT license.