Lookahead and lookbehind constraints aren't allowed to contain backrefs,
and parentheses within them are always considered non-capturing. Or so
says the manual. But the regexp parser forgot about these rules once
inside a parenthesized subexpression, so that constructs like (\w)(?=(\1))
were accepted (but then not correctly executed --- a case like this acted
like (\w)(?=\w), without any enforcement that the two \w's match the same
text). And in (?=((foo))) the innermost parentheses would be counted as
capturing parentheses, though no text would ever be captured for them.
To fix, properly pass down the "type" argument to the recursive invocation
of parse().
Back-patch to all supported branches; it was agreed that silent
misexecution of such patterns is worse than throwing an error, even though
new errors in minor releases are generally not desirable.
A lookbehind constraint is like a lookahead constraint in that it consumes
no text; but it checks for existence (or nonexistence) of a match *ending*
at the current point in the string, rather than one *starting* at the
current point. This is a long-requested feature since it exists in many
other regex libraries, but Henry Spencer had never got around to
implementing it in the code we use.
Just making it work is actually pretty trivial; but naive copying of the
logic for lookahead constraints leads to code that often spends O(N^2) time
to scan an N-character string, because we have to run the match engine
from string start to the current probe point each time the constraint is
checked. In typical use-cases a lookbehind constraint will be written at
the start of the regex and hence will need to be checked at every character
--- so O(N^2) work overall. To fix that, I introduced a third copy of the
core DFA matching loop, paralleling the existing longest() and shortest()
loops. This version, matchuntil(), can suspend and resume matching given
a couple of pointers' worth of storage space. So we need only run it
across the string once, stopping at each interesting probe point and then
resuming to advance to the next one.
I also put in an optimization that simplifies one-character lookahead and
lookbehind constraints, such as "(?=x)" or "(?<!\w)", into AHEAD and BEHIND
constraints, which already existed in the engine. This avoids the overhead
of the LACON machinery entirely for these rather common cases.
The net result is that lookbehind constraints run a factor of three or so
slower than Perl's for multi-character constraints, but faster than Perl's
for one-character constraints ... and they work fine for variable-length
constraints, which Perl gives up on entirely. So that's not bad from a
competitive perspective, and there's room for further optimization if
anyone cares. (In reality, raw scan rate across a large input string is
probably not that big a deal for Postgres usage anyway; so I'm happy if
it's linear.)
pg_regprefix was doing nothing with lookahead constraints, which would
be fine if it were the right kind of nothing, but it isn't: we have to
terminate our search for a fixed prefix, not just pretend the LACON arc
isn't there. Otherwise, if the current state has both a LACON outarc and a
single plain-color outarc, we'd falsely conclude that the color represents
an addition to the fixed prefix, and generate an extracted index condition
that restricts the indexscan too much. (See added regression test case.)
Terminating the search is conservative: we could traverse the LACON arc
(thus assuming that the constraint can be satisfied at runtime) and then
examine the outarcs of the linked-to state. But that would be a lot more
work than it seems worth, because writing a LACON followed by a single
plain character is a pretty silly thing to do.
This makes a difference only in rather contrived cases, but it's a bug,
so back-patch to all supported branches.
Revert our previous addition of "all" flags to copyins() and copyouts();
they're no longer needed, and were never anything but an unsightly hack.
Improve a couple of infelicities in the REG_DEBUG code for dumping
the NFA data structure, including adding code to count the total
number of states and arcs.
Add a couple of missed error checks.
Add some more documentation in the README file, and some regression tests
illustrating cases that exceeded the state-count limit and/or took
unreasonable amounts of time before this set of patches.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
This code previously counted the number of NFA states it created, and
complained if a limit was exceeded, so as to prevent bizarre regex patterns
from consuming unreasonable time or memory. That's fine as far as it went,
but the code paid no attention to how many arcs linked those states. Since
regexes can be contrived that have O(N) states but will need O(N^2) arcs
after fixempties() processing, it was still possible to blow out memory,
and take a long time doing it too. To fix, modify the bookkeeping to count
space used by both states and arcs.
I did not bother with including the "color map" in the accounting; it
can only grow to a few megabytes, which is not a lot in comparison to
what we're allowing for states+arcs (about 150MB on 64-bit machines
or half that on 32-bit machines).
Looking at some of the larger real-world regexes captured in the Tcl
regression test suite suggests that the most that is likely to be needed
for regexes found in the wild is under 10MB, so I believe that the current
limit has enough headroom to make it okay to keep it as a hard-wired limit.
In connection with this, redefine REG_ETOOBIG as meaning "regular
expression is too complex"; the previous wording of "nfa has too many
states" was already somewhat inapropos because of the error code's use
for stack depth overrun, and it was not very user-friendly either.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
The previous coding would create a new intermediate state every time it
wanted to interchange the ordering of two constraint arcs. Certain regex
features such as \Y can generate large numbers of parallel constraint arcs,
and if we needed to reorder the results of that, we created unreasonable
numbers of intermediate states. To improve matters, keep a list of
already-created intermediate states associated with the state currently
being considered by the outer loop; we can re-use such states to place all
the new arcs leading to the same destination or source.
I also took the trouble to redefine push() and pull() to have a less risky
API: they no longer delete any state or arc that the caller might possibly
have a pointer to, except for the specifically-passed constraint arc.
This reduces the risk of re-introducing the same type of error seen in
the failed patch for CVE-2007-4772.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
The previous coding took something like O(N^4) time to fully process a
chain of N EMPTY arcs. We can't really do much better than O(N^2) because
we have to insert about that many arcs, but we can do lots better than
what's there now. The win comes partly from using mergeins() to amortize
de-duplication of arcs across multiple source states, and partly from
exploiting knowledge of the ordering of arcs for each state to avoid
looking at arcs we don't need to consider during the scan. We do have
to be a bit careful of the possible reordering of arcs introduced by
the sort-merge coding of the previous commit, but that's not hard to
deal with.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Change the singly-linked in-arc and out-arc lists to be doubly-linked,
so that arc deletion is constant time rather than having worst-case time
proportional to the number of other arcs on the connected states.
Modify the bulk arc transfer operations copyins(), copyouts(), moveins(),
moveouts() so that they use a sort-and-merge algorithm whenever there's
more than a small number of arcs to be copied or moved. The previous
method is O(N^2) in the number of arcs involved, because it performs
duplicate checking independently for each copied arc. The new method may
change the ordering of existing arcs for the destination state, but nothing
really cares about that.
Provide another bulk arc copying method mergeins(), which is unused as
of this commit but is needed for the next one. It basically is like
copyins(), but the source arcs might not all come from the same state.
Replace the O(N^2) bubble-sort algorithm used in carcsort() with a qsort()
call.
These changes greatly improve the performance of regex compilation for
large or complex regexes, at the cost of extra space for arc storage during
compilation. The original tradeoff was probably fine when it was made, but
now we care more about speed and less about memory consumption.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
It's possible to construct regular expressions that contain loops of
constraint arcs (that is, ^ $ AHEAD BEHIND or LACON arcs). There's no use
in fully traversing such a loop at execution, since you'd just end up in
the same NFA state without having consumed any input. Worse, such a loop
leads to infinite looping in the pullback/pushfwd stage of compilation,
because we keep pushing or pulling the same constraints around the loop
in a vain attempt to move them to the pre or post state. Such looping was
previously recognized in CVE-2007-4772; but the fix only handled the case
of trivial single-state loops (that is, a constraint arc leading back to
its source state) ... and not only that, it was incorrect even for that
case, because it broke the admittedly-not-very-clearly-stated API contract
of the pull() and push() subroutines. The first two regression test cases
added by this commit exhibit patterns that result in assertion failures
because of that (though there seem to be no ill effects in non-assert
builds). The other new test cases exhibit multi-state constraint loops;
in an unpatched build they will run until the NFA state-count limit is
exceeded.
To fix, remove the code added for CVE-2007-4772, and instead create a
general-purpose constraint-loop-breaking phase of regex compilation that
executes before we do pullback/pushfwd. Since we never need to traverse
a constraint loop fully, we can just break the loop at any chosen spot,
if we add clone states that can replicate any sequence of arc transitions
that would've traversed just part of the loop.
Also add some commentary clarifying why we have to have all these
machinations in the first place.
This class of problems has been known for some time --- we had a report
from Marc Mamin about two years ago, for example, and there are related
complaints in the Tcl bug tracker. I had discussed a fix of this kind
off-list with Henry Spencer, but didn't get around to doing something
about it until the issue was rediscovered by Greg Stark recently.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Some of the functions in regex compilation and execution recurse, and
therefore could in principle be driven to stack overflow. The Tcl crew
has seen this happen in practice in duptraverse(), though their fix was
to put in a hard-wired limit on the number of recursive levels, which is
not too appetizing --- fortunately, we have enough infrastructure to check
the actually available stack. Greg Stark has also seen it in other places
while fuzz testing on a machine with limited stack space. Let's put guards
in to prevent crashes in all these places.
Since the regex code would leak memory if we simply threw elog(ERROR),
we have to introduce an API that checks for stack depth without throwing
such an error. Fortunately that's not difficult.
In cfindloop(), if the initial call to shortest() reports that a
zero-length match is possible at the current search start point, but then
it is unable to construct any actual match to that, it'll just loop around
with the same start point, and thus make no progress. We need to force the
start point to be advanced. This is safe because the loop over "begin"
points has already tried and failed to match starting at "close", so there
is surely no need to try that again.
This bug was introduced in commit e2bd904955,
wherein we allowed continued searching after we'd run out of match
possibilities, but evidently failed to think hard enough about exactly
where we needed to search next.
Because of the way this code works, such a match failure is only possible
in the presence of backrefs --- otherwise, shortest()'s judgment that a
match is possible should always be correct. That probably explains how
come the bug has escaped detection for several years.
The actual fix is a one-liner, but I took the trouble to add/improve some
comments related to the loop logic.
After fixing that, the submitted test case "()*\1" didn't loop anymore.
But it reported failure, though it seems like it ought to match a
zero-length string; both Tcl and Perl think it does. That seems to be from
overenthusiastic optimization on my part when I rewrote the iteration match
logic in commit 173e29aa5deefd9e71c183583ba37805c8102a72: we can't just
"declare victory" for a zero-length match without bothering to set match
data for capturing parens inside the iterator node.
Per fuzz testing by Greg Stark. The first part of this is a bug in all
supported branches, and the second part is a bug since 9.2 where the
iteration rewrite happened.
Commit 9662143f0c added infrastructure to
allow regular-expression operations to be terminated early in the event
of SIGINT etc. However, fuzz testing by Greg Stark disclosed that there
are still cases where regex compilation could run for a long time without
noticing a cancel request. Specifically, the fixempties() phase never
adds new states, only new arcs, so it doesn't hit the cancel check I'd put
in newstate(). Add one to newarc() as well to cover that.
Some experimentation of my own found that regex execution could also run
for a long time despite a pending cancel. We'd put a high-level cancel
check into cdissect(), but there was none inside the core text-matching
routines longest() and shortest(). Ordinarily those inner loops are very
very fast ... but in the presence of lookahead constraints, not so much.
As a compromise, stick a cancel check into the stateset cache-miss
function, which is enough to guarantee a cancel check at least once per
lookahead constraint test.
Making this work required more attention to error handling throughout the
regex executor. Henry Spencer had apparently originally intended longest()
and shortest() to be incapable of incurring errors while running, so
neither they nor their subroutines had well-defined error reporting
behaviors. However, that was already broken by the lookahead constraint
feature, since lacon() can surely suffer an out-of-memory failure ---
which, in the code as it stood, might never be reported to the user at all,
but just silently be treated as a non-match of the lookahead constraint.
Normalize all that by inserting explicit error tests as needed. I took the
opportunity to add some more comments to the code, too.
Back-patch to all supported branches, like the previous patch.
After an internal failure in shortest() or longest() while pinning down the
exact location of a match, find() forgot to free the DFA structure before
returning. This is pretty unlikely to occur, since we just successfully
ran the "search" variant of the DFA; but it could happen, and it would
result in a session-lifespan memory leak since this code uses malloc()
directly. Problem seems to have been aboriginal in Spencer's library,
so back-patch all the way.
In passing, correct a thinko in a comment I added awhile back about the
meaning of the "ntree" field.
I happened across these issues while comparing our code to Tcl's version
of the library.
Sync our regex code with upstream changes since last time we did this,
which was Tcl 8.5.11 (see commit 08fd6ff37f).
The only functional change here is to disbelieve that an octal escape is
three digits long if it would exceed \377. That's a bug fix, but it's
a minor one and could change the interpretation of working regexes, so
don't back-patch.
In addition to that, s/INFINITY/DUPINF/ to eliminate the risk of collisions
with <math.h>'s macro, and s/LOCAL/NOPROP/ because that also seems like
an unnecessarily collision-prone macro name.
There were some other cosmetic changes in their copy that I did not adopt,
notably a rather half-hearted attempt at renaming some of the C functions
in a more verbose style. (I'm not necessarily against the concept, but
renaming just a few functions in the package is not an improvement.)
The list-wrangling here was done wrong, allowing the same state to get
put into the list twice. The following loop then would clone it twice.
The second clone would wind up with no inarcs, so that there was no
observable misbehavior AFAICT, but a useless state in the finished NFA
isn't an especially good thing.
newnfa() failed to set the regex error state when malloc() fails.
Several places in regcomp.c failed to check for an error after calling
subre(). Each of these mistakes could lead to null-pointer-dereference
crashes in memory-starved backends.
Report and patch by Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to all branches.
strncpy() has a well-deserved reputation for being unsafe, so make an
effort to get rid of nearly all occurrences in HEAD.
A large fraction of the remaining uses were passing length less than or
equal to the known strlen() of the source, in which case no null-padding
can occur and the behavior is equivalent to memcpy(), though doubtless
slower and certainly harder to reason about. So just use memcpy() in
these cases.
In other cases, use either StrNCpy() or strlcpy() as appropriate (depending
on whether padding to the full length of the destination buffer seems
useful).
I left a few strncpy() calls alone in the src/timezone/ code, to keep it
in sync with upstream (the IANA tzcode distribution). There are also a
few such calls in ecpg that could possibly do with more analysis.
AFAICT, none of these changes are more than cosmetic, except for the four
occurrences in fe-secure-openssl.c, which are in fact buggy: an overlength
source leads to a non-null-terminated destination buffer and ensuing
misbehavior. These don't seem like security issues, first because no stack
clobber is possible and second because if your values of sslcert etc are
coming from untrusted sources then you've got problems way worse than this.
Still, it's undesirable to have unpredictable behavior for overlength
inputs, so back-patch those four changes to all active branches.
When the number of allowed iterations is limited (either a "?" quantifier
or a bound expression), the last sub-match has to reach to the end of the
target string. The previous coding here first tried the shortest possible
match (one character, usually) and then gave up and back-tracked if that
didn't work, typically leading to failure to match overall, as shown in
bug #11478 from Christoph Berg. The minimum change to fix that would be to
not decrement k before "goto backtrack"; but that would be a pretty stupid
solution, because we'd laboriously try each possible sub-match length
before finally discovering that only ending at the end can work. Instead,
force the sub-match endpoint limit up to the end for even the first
shortest() call if we cannot have any more sub-matches after this one.
Bug introduced in my rewrite that added the iterdissect logic, commit
173e29aa5d. The shortest-first search code
was too closely modeled on the longest-first code, which hasn't got this
issue since it tries a match reaching to the end to start with anyway.
Back-patch to all affected branches.
If pg_regcomp failed after having invoked markst/cleanst, it would leak any
"struct subre" nodes it had created. (We've already detected all regex
syntax errors at that point, so the only likely causes of later failure
would be query cancel or out-of-memory.) To fix, make sure freesrnode
knows the difference between the pre-cleanst and post-cleanst cleanup
procedures. Add some documentation of this less-than-obvious point.
Also, newlacon did the wrong thing with an out-of-memory failure from
realloc(), so that the previously allocated array would be leaked.
Both of these are pretty low-probability scenarios, but a bug is a bug,
so patch all the way back.
Per bug #10976 from Arthur O'Dwyer.
For a regex containing backrefs, pg_regexec() might fail to free all the
sub-DFAs that were created during execution, resulting in a permanent
(session lifespan) memory leak. Problem was introduced by me in commit
587359479a. Per report from Sandro Santilli;
diagnosis by Greg Stark.
The regex code didn't have any provision for query cancel; which is
unsurprising given its non-Postgres origin, but still problematic since
some operations can take a long time. Introduce a callback function to
check for a pending query cancel or session termination request, and
call it in a couple of strategic spots where we can make the regex code
exit with an error indicator.
If we ever actually split out the regex code as a standalone library,
some additional work will be needed to let the cancel callback function
be specified externally to the library. But that's straightforward
(certainly so by comparison to putting the locale-dependent character
classification logic on a similar arms-length basis), and there seems
no need to do it right now.
A bigger issue is that there may be more places than these two where
we need to check for cancels. We can always add more checks later,
now that the infrastructure is in place.
Since there are known examples of not-terribly-long regexes that can
lock up a backend for a long time, back-patch to all supported branches.
I have hopes of fixing the known performance problems later, but adding
query cancel ability seems like a good idea even if they were all fixed.
These changes should generally improve correctness/maintainability.
A nice side benefit is that several kilobytes move from initialized
data to text segment, allowing them to be shared across processes and
probably reducing copy-on-write overhead while forking a new backend.
Unfortunately this doesn't seem to help libpq in the same way (at least
not when it's compiled with -fpic on x86_64), but we can hope the linker
at least collects all nominally-const data together even if it's not
actually part of the text segment.
Also, make pg_encname_tbl[] static in encnames.c, since there seems
no very good reason for any other code to use it; per a suggestion
from Wim Lewis, who independently submitted a patch that was mostly
a subset of this one.
Oskari Saarenmaa, with some editorialization by me
An ancient logic error in cfindloop() could cause the regex engine to fail
to find matches that begin later than the start of the string. This
function is only used when the regex pattern contains a back reference,
and so far as we can tell the error is only reachable if the pattern is
non-greedy (i.e. its first quantifier uses the ? modifier). Furthermore,
the actual match must begin after some potential match that satisfies the
DFA but then fails the back-reference's match test.
Reported and fixed by Jeevan Chalke, with cosmetic adjustments by me.
This works by extracting trigrams from the given regular expression,
in generally the same spirit as the previously-existing support for
LIKE searches, though of course the details are far more complicated.
Currently, only GIN indexes are supported. We might be able to make
it work with GiST indexes later.
The implementation includes adding API functions to backend/regex/
to provide a view of the search NFA created from a regular expression.
These functions are meant to be generic enough to be supportable in
a standalone version of the regex library, should that ever happen.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane
The previous coding of this function could get into situations where it
would never terminate, because successive passes would re-add EMPTY arcs
that had been removed by the previous pass. Rewrite the function
completely using a new algorithm that is guaranteed to terminate, and
also seems to be usually faster than the old one. Per Tcl bugs 3604074
and 3606683.
Tom Lane and Don Porter
parseqatom() failed to check for an error return (NULL result) from its
recursive call to parsebranch(), and in consequence could crash with a
null-pointer dereference after an error return. This bug has been there
since day one, but wasn't noticed before, probably because most error cases
in parsebranch() didn't actually lead to returning NULL. Add the missing
error check, and also tweak parsebranch() to exit in a less indirect
fashion after a call to parseqatom() fails.
Report by Tomasz Karlik, fix by me.
rfree() failed to cope with the case that pg_regcomp() had initialized the
regex_t struct but then failed to allocate any memory for re->re_guts (ie,
the first malloc call in pg_regcomp() failed). It would try to touch the
guts struct anyway, and thus dump core. This is a sufficiently narrow
corner case that it's not surprising it's never been seen in the field;
but still a bug is a bug, so patch all active branches.
Noted while investigating whether we need to call pg_regfree after a
failure return from pg_regcomp. Other than this bug, it turns out we
don't, so adjust comments appropriately.
To generate btree-indexable conditions from regex WHERE conditions (such as
WHERE indexed_col ~ '^foo'), we need to be able to identify any fixed
prefix that a regex might have; that is, find any string that must be a
prefix of all strings satisfying the regex. We used to do that with
entirely ad-hoc code that looked at the source text of the regex. It
didn't know very much about regex syntax, which mostly meant that it would
fail to identify some optimizable cases; but Viktor Rosenfeld reported that
it would produce actively wrong answers for quantified parenthesized
subexpressions, such as '^(foo)?bar'. Rather than trying to extend the
ad-hoc code to cover this, let's get rid of it altogether in favor of
identifying prefixes by examining the compiled form of a regex.
To do this, I've added a new entry point "pg_regprefix" to the regex library;
hopefully it is defined in a sufficiently general fashion that it can remain
in the library when/if that code gets split out as a standalone project.
Since this bug has been there for a very long time, this fix needs to get
back-patched. However it depends on some other recent commits (particularly
the addition of wchar-to-database-encoding conversion), so I'll commit this
separately and then go to work on back-porting the necessary fixes.
The previous coding abused the first element of a cNFA state's arcs list
to hold a per-state flag bit, which was confusing, undocumented, and not
even particularly efficient. Get rid of that in favor of a separate
"stflags" vector. Since there's only one bit in use, I chose to allocate a
char per state; we could possibly replace this with a bitmap at some point,
but that would make accesses a little slower. It's already about 8X
smaller than before, so let's not get overly tense.
Also document the representation better than it was before, which is to say
not at all.
This patch is a byproduct of investigations towards extracting a "fixed
prefix" string from the compact-NFA representation of regex patterns.
Might need to back-patch it if we decide to back-patch that fix, but for
now it's just code cleanup so I'll just put it in HEAD.
zaptreesubs() was coded to unconditionally reset a capture subre's
corresponding pmatch[] entry. However, in regexes without backrefs, that
array is caller-supplied and might not have as many entries as the regex
has capturing parens. So check the array length and do nothing if there
is no corresponding entry, much as subset() does. Failure to check this
resulted in a stack clobber in the case reported by Marko Kreen.
This bug appears to have been latent in the regex library from the
beginning. It was not exposed because find() called dissect() not
cdissect(), and the dissect() code path didn't ever call zaptreesubs()
(formerly zapmem()). When I unified dissect() and cdissect() in commit
4dd78bf37a, the problem was exposed.
Now that I've seen this, I'm rather suspicious that we might need to
back-patch it; but will refrain for now, for lack of evidence that
the case can be hit in the previous coding.
The "uncomplicated" case isn't materially less complicated than the full
case, certainly not enough so to justify duplicating nearly 500 lines
of code. The only extra work being done in the full path is zaptreesubs,
which is very cheap compared to everything else being done here, and
besides that I'm less than convinced that it's not needed in some cases
even without backrefs.
In nested sub-regex trees, lower-level nodes created DFAs and then
destroyed them again before exiting, which is a bit dumb considering that
the recursive search is likely to call those nodes again later. Instead
cache each created DFA until the end of pg_regexec(). This is basically a
space for time tradeoff, in that it might increase the maximum memory
usage. However, in most regex patterns there are not all that many subre
nodes, so not that many DFAs --- and in any case, the peak usage occurs
when reaching the bottom recursion level, and except for alternation cases
that's going to be the same anyway.
Apparently some primordial version of Spencer's engine needed cdissect()
and child functions to be able to continue matching from a previous
position when re-called. That is dead code, though, since trivial
inspection shows that cdissect can never be entered without having
previously done zapmem which resets the relevant retry counter. I have
also verified experimentally that no case in the Tcl regression tests
reaches cdissect with a nonzero retry value. Accordingly, remove that
logic. This doesn't really save any noticeable number of cycles in itself,
but it is one step towards making dissect() and cdissect() equivalent,
which will allow removing hundreds of lines of near-duplicated code.
Since struct subre's "retry" field is no longer particularly related to
any kind of retry, rename it to "id". As of this commit it's only used
for identifying a subre node in debug printouts, so you might think we
should get rid of the field entirely; but I have a plan for another use.
Cases where a back-reference is part of a larger subexpression that
is quantified have never worked in Spencer's regex engine, because
he used a compile-time transformation that neglected the need to
check the back-reference match in iterations before the last one.
(That was okay for capturing parens, and we still do it if the
regex has *only* capturing parens ... but it's not okay for backrefs.)
To make this work properly, we have to add an "iteration" node type
to the regex engine's vocabulary of sub-regex nodes. Since this is a
moderately large change with a fair risk of introducing new bugs of its
own, apply to HEAD only, even though it's a fix for a longstanding bug.
The syntax "\n*", that is a backref with a * quantifier directly applied
to it, has never worked correctly in Spencer's library. This has been an
open bug in the Tcl bug tracker since 2005:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1115587&group_id=10894&atid=110894
The core of the problem is in parseqatom(), which first changes "\n*" to
"\n+|" and then applies repeat() to the NFA representing the backref atom.
repeat() thinks that any arc leading into its "rp" argument is part of the
sub-NFA to be repeated. Unfortunately, since parseqatom() already created
the arc that was intended to represent the empty bypass around "\n+", this
arc gets moved too, so that it now leads into the state loop created by
repeat(). Thus, what was supposed to be an "empty" bypass gets turned into
something that represents zero or more repetitions of the NFA representing
the backref atom. In the original example, in place of
^([bc])\1*$
we now have something that acts like
^([bc])(\1+|[bc]*)$
At runtime, the branch involving the actual backref fails, as it's supposed
to, but then the other branch succeeds anyway.
We could no doubt fix this by some rearrangement of the operations in
parseqatom(), but that code is plenty ugly already, and what's more the
whole business of converting "x*" to "x+|" probably needs to go away to fix
another problem I'll mention in a moment. Instead, this patch suppresses
the *-conversion when the target is a simple backref atom, leaving the case
of m == 0 to be handled at runtime. This makes the patch in regcomp.c a
one-liner, at the cost of having to tweak cbrdissect() a little. In the
event I went a bit further than that and rewrote cbrdissect() to check all
the string-length-related conditions before it starts comparing characters.
It seems a bit stupid to possibly iterate through many copies of an
n-character backreference, only to fail at the end because the target
string's length isn't a multiple of n --- we could have found that out
before starting. The existing coding could only be a win if integer
division is hugely expensive compared to character comparison, but I don't
know of any modern machine where that might be true.
This does not fix all the problems with quantified back-references. In
particular, the code is still broken for back-references that appear within
a larger expression that is quantified (so that direct insertion of the
quantification limits into the BACKREF node doesn't apply). I think fixing
that will take some major surgery on the NFA code, specifically introducing
an explicit iteration node type instead of trying to transform iteration
into concatenation of modified regexps.
Back-patch to all supported branches. In HEAD, also add a regression test
case for this. (It may seem a bit silly to create a regression test file
for just one test case; but I'm expecting that we will soon import a whole
bunch of regex regression tests from Tcl, so might as well create the
infrastructure now.)
While this doesn't save a huge amount of runtime, it still seems worth
doing, especially since I realized that the data copying I did in my first
draft was quite unnecessary. In this version, once we have the results
cached, getting them back for re-use is really very cheap.
Also, remove the hard-wired limitation to not consider wctype.h results for
character codes above 255. It turns out that we can't push the limit as
far up as I'd originally hoped, because the regex colormap code is not
efficient enough to cope very well with character classes containing many
thousand letters, which a Unicode locale is entirely capable of producing.
Still, we can push it up to U+7FF (which I chose as the limit of 2-byte
UTF8 characters), which will at least make Eastern Europeans happy pending
a better solution. Thus, this commit resolves the specific complaint in
bug #6457, but not the more general issue that letters of non-western
alphabets are mostly not recognized as matching [[:alpha:]].
Create src/backend/regex/README to hold an implementation overview of
the regex package, and fill it in with some preliminary notes about
the code's DFA/NFA processing and colormap management. Much more to
do there of course.
Also, improve some code comments around the colormap and cvec code.
No functional changes except to add one missing assert.
Sync our regex code with upstream changes since last time we did this,
which was Tcl 8.5.0 (see commit df1e965e12).
There are no functional changes here; the main point is just to lay down
a commit-log marker that somebody has looked at this recently, and to do
what we can to keep the two codebases comparable.
This involves getting the character classification and case-folding
functions in the regex library to use the collations infrastructure.
Most of this work had been done already in connection with the upper/lower
and LIKE logic, so it was a simple matter of transposition.
While at it, split out these functions into a separate source file
regc_pg_locale.c, so that they can be correctly labeled with the Postgres
project's license rather than the Scriptics license. These functions are
100% Postgres-written code whereas what remains in regc_locale.c is still
mostly not ours, so lumping them both under the same copyright notice was
getting more and more misleading.
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas