# PCRE

6 Hacker News commenters recommended PCRE and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Widely used free regex library that people treat as the standard for text matching, with rich features and a long track record.

## Why people recommend it

- Widely treated as standard regex library (2 comments): "PCRE regex is kind of the lingua franca of text-matching, and making it available would be helpful for newcomers imo." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403259)) "Everyone just ignores it and uses a third party library like PCRE, RE2, etc" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49380723))
- Wanted in standard library and tools (2 comments): "PCRE regexes would be a great inclusion to the stdlib, and would probably be popular." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374833)) "A fast tool that does what sed and awk do with PCRE2 would be amazing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507955))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [regex crate for Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/regex.md): 9 recommend
- [regex-utils](https://hackerapproved.com/p/regex-utils.md): 5 recommend
- [RE# regex engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/re-sharp-regex-engine.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "PCRE", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pcre/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).