A while ago, I have ported the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) library to z/OS to be used with COBOL (and perhaps other LE languages.)  I am maintaining the port (located on CBTTAPE.org, file 939) to be current with  the main distribution and we are now in PCRE2 10.33.

COBOL people tend to be conservative, yet, the regex technology is pretty old and mature!

I would like you to be open minded and try it and tell me what have you liked and/or disliked about regexes, the library, the distribution, etc.

The distribution includes a COBOL demo program to demonstrate the use in COBOL.

Thank you all

ZA

Hi ZA,

This is a really exciting contribution and on behalf of IBM I would like to thank you for your addition to the z/OS COBOL community! The COBOL compilers team hopes to try this out soon. In the meantime, I encourage the members of this community to give it a try and provide feedback. If you're looking to reach a wider audience, you might try the very active IBM mainframes Google Group too.

Warm regards,

Nicole

Hi Nicole

It is encouraging that IBM is looking into this.  The PCRE2 library is one of the most popular RegEx engines out there.  An open source, written in C.  I've got a wind that IBM UK is looking into the JIT part of the library for Linux implementation.  My implementation caters to the old style mainframe users with COBOL and EBCDIC in mind, although it could be expanded.  I would be more than happy to work with IBM on any direction you may want to suggest.

BTW, we have developed an API for Rexx as well

Thanks

ZA