[Rcpp-devel] Regular Expressions

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 March 2013 at 07:25, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
| I did rebuild boost from source as part of this since I also figured
| that might be a problem.  On Windows there is a tool that is used  in
| rebuilding the source (presumably similar to configure on UNIX) and I
| rebuilt that tool from source too.  I may play around with all this a
| bit more but it does take half an hour to build boost from source.
| Its possible that some of the things I tried prior to rebuilding from
| source would have worked had that they been tried with the rebuilt
| version of boost.

Yes. Boost is not for the faint of heart, and I am no fan of bjam.

I am pretty glad I get this handed in a "just works" fashion on Unix.
 
| Is it intended that BH will include boost libraries like Boost.Regex
| which is not a header-only library?  Alternately if R made its own

No, absolutely not. The idea of BH is headers-only so we avoid all these
hassles. So boost-regex was just a distraction.

| regular expression libraries available to C++ programs there could be
| an advantage in terms of consistency with R of the regular expressions
| accepted.
| 
| Regarding packages, can you suggest which one(s) to look at?

RPostgreSQL certainly builds the client parts of the PG library on Windows
when it cannot assume libraries.  Within the Rcpp world I just came across
another package that had Boost sources but right now I cannot recall which
one it was.

If you really just want regexp Boost may be overkill.  Did you look into
accessing libpcre via R?  Or just bundling libpcre?  Just a thought...

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com