Crate grep_matcher

This crate provides an interface for regular expressions, with a focus on line oriented search. The purpose of this crate is to provide a low level matching interface that permits any kind of substring or regex implementation to power the search routines provided by the grep-searcher crate.

The primary thing provided by this crate is the Matcher trait. The trait defines an abstract interface for text search. It is robust enough to support everything from basic substring search all the way to arbitrarily complex regular expression implementations without sacrificing performance.

A key design decision made in this crate is the use of internal iteration, or otherwise known as the “push” model of searching. In this paradigm, implementations of the Matcher trait will drive search and execute callbacks provided by the caller when a match is found. This is in contrast to the usual style of external iteration (the “pull” model) found throughout the Rust ecosystem. There are two primary reasons why internal iteration was chosen:

• Some search implementations may themselves require internal iteration. Converting an internal iterator to an external iterator can be non-trivial and sometimes even practically impossible.
• Rust’s type system isn’t quite expressive enough to write a generic interface using external iteration without giving something else up (namely, ease of use and/or performance).

In other words, internal iteration was chosen because it is the lowest common denominator and because it is probably the least bad way of expressing the interface in today’s Rust. As a result, this trait isn’t specifically intended for everyday use, although, you might find it to be a happy price to pay if you want to write code that is generic over multiple different regex implementations.

Structs

• ByteSet
  A set of bytes.
• LineTerminator
  A line terminator.
• Match
  The type of a match.
• NoCaptures
  NoCaptures provides an always-empty implementation of the Captures trait.
• NoError
  NoError provides an error type for matchers that never produce errors.

Enums

• LineMatchKind
  The type of match for a line oriented matcher.

Traits

• Captures
  A trait that describes implementations of capturing groups.
• Matcher
  A matcher defines an interface for regular expression implementations.