pgsql: Fix misoptimization of "{1,1}" quantifiers in regular expression - Mailing list pgsql-committers

From Tom Lane
Subject pgsql: Fix misoptimization of "{1,1}" quantifiers in regular expression
Date
Msg-id E1hPxM9-0005Tq-1R@gemulon.postgresql.org
Whole thread Raw
List pgsql-committers
Fix misoptimization of "{1,1}" quantifiers in regular expressions.

A bounded quantifier with m = n = 1 might be thought a no-op.  But
according to our documentation (which traces back to Henry Spencer's
original man page) it still imposes greediness, or non-greediness in the
case of the non-greedy variant "{1,1}?", on whatever it's attached to.

This turns out not to work though, because parseqatom() optimizes away
the m = n = 1 case without regard for whether it's supposed to change
the greediness of the argument RE.

We can fix this by just not applying the optimization when the greediness
needs to change; the subsequent general cases handle it fine.

The three cases in which we can still apply the optimization are
(a) no quantifier, or quantifier does not impose a preference;
(b) atom has no greediness property, implying it cannot match a
variable amount of text anyway; or
(c) quantifier's greediness is same as atom's.
Note that in most cases where one of these applies, we'd have exited
earlier in the "not a messy case" fast path.  I think it's now only
possible to get to the optimization when the atom involves capturing
parentheses or a non-top-level backref.

Back-patch to all supported branches.  I'd ordinarily be hesitant to
put a subtle behavioral change into back branches, but in this case
it's very hard to see a reason why somebody would write "{1,1}?" unless
they're trying to get the documented change-of-greediness behavior.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/5bb27a41-350d-37bf-901e-9d26f5592dd0@charter.net

Branch
------
REL9_4_STABLE

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b1ca28e57e1209769341451c07d7331c822f25a7

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/regex/regcomp.c         |  5 +++-
src/test/regress/expected/regex.out | 49 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
src/test/regress/sql/regex.sql      | 10 ++++++++
3 files changed, 63 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)


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