NATIVE(5re)

💖 NATIVE(5re) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to native(5re) — yeah, section 5re, and the manual it lives in is literally labeled [FIXME: manual] 😭 (iconic of them honestly). This is the page for native, the libre native regular expression syntax — the regex dialect libre speaks natively, and you're about to learn it. ✨

Fair warning before we start: this page is kind of a work in progress. Some sections are just a pointer at a table, one section is literally just the word TODO, and one section is straight-up empty. That's not me skipping anything, that's genuinely the whole page. We ride at dawn anyway 🫶

🌸 FLAGS 🌸

The flags? Bestie. They're in Table 1. That's it, that's the section. Go look at Table 1, it's got you 💅

✨ ATOMS ✨

Same energy: Table 2. All the atoms, happily living in Table 2. Go check it out 🦋

🎀 ESCAPES 🎀

And again — Table 3. Every escape you could want, chilling in Table 3. periodt.

🌈 RANGES 🌈

Ranges are those square-bracket situations, and the page gives you two shapes to look at:

[a-z]
[a--]

Here's the tea ☕:

• a and z are character literals or numeric escape sequences — so it's not just letters, bestie, you can absolutely drop a numeric escape in there.
• a ^ inverts the range. classic behaviour, we love a negation moment.
• A trailing - is allowed (that's the [a--] vibe up there 👀).
• A leading - is... not? The page literally ends that sentence with a question mark, so ngl even the docs aren't fully committing here. Not me making stuff up to fill the gap 💀

🔥 OPERATORS 🔥

You guessed it: Table 4. Every operator, all of them, in Table 4. slay.

👑 ANCHORS 👑

Okay so this section doesn't describe anchors yet at all — instead it's a little TODO list of stuff the docs want to nail down later:

TODO: syntatic precedence, permit redunancy non-satisfiable situations

(Yes I copied those typos exactly, no I will not be fixing them, they're part of the lore now 🙈)

So: syntactic precedence and permitting redundant, non-satisfiable situations are both documented as still-to-do, not documented as behaviour. Do not go assuming, bestie 🫶

💀 CAVEATS 💀

Heads up: this section is empty in the page. There is nothing under CAVEATS. Zero caveats, allegedly. I'm not adding any, because I'm not out here inventing warnings 🔥

🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

Go get your read on, these are the siblings:

• re(1)
• libre(3)
• glob(5re)
• like(5re)
• literal(5re)
• sql(5re)

and that's the whole page, bestie! 🎀 little sign-off corner: this one's native, dated 01/01/1980 (yes, that date, don't ask), sitting in section 5re of the [FIXME: manual] manual. now go read Table 1 through Table 4 for me, mwah 💜🦋