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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
