PCRE
Ranked 2 of 4 regex libraries by recommenders
Widely used free regex library that people treat as the standard for text matching, with rich features and a long track record.
Widely used free regex library that people treat as the standard for text matching, with rich features and a long track record.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 60%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Widely treated as standard regex library
“PCRE regex is kind of the lingua franca of text-matching, and making it available would be helpful for newcomers imo.”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Why Janet?” “Everyone just ignores it and uses a third party library like PCRE, RE2, etc”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “Malicious Rust Crate Arrayref Runs a Build-Time Payload” Wanted in standard library and tools
“PCRE regexes would be a great inclusion to the stdlib, and would probably be popular.”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “Why Janet?” “A fast tool that does what sed and awk do with PCRE2 would be amazing.”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, Git grep, ucg, pt, sift}”
Other regex libraries people recommend
The three most recommended other regex libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| regex crate for Rust | 9 | 3 | 75% | 5 | — | — |
| PCREThis page | 6 | 4 | 60% | 5 | — | — |
| regex-utils | 5 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| RE# regex engine | 5 | 1 | 83% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
10 of the 11 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Everyone just ignores it and uses a third party library like PCRE, RE2, etc”
“When you use PCRE features for string matching, that may degrade to exponential time which makes it useless.”
“I've become a fan of whatever PCRE2 understands”
“PCRE regex is kind of the lingua franca of text-matching, and making it available would be helpful for newcomers imo.”
“Anything that can be done with a regex can also be done with a PEG, and the PEG will be much more readable.”
“PCRE regexes would be a great inclusion to the stdlib, and would probably be popular.”
“A fast tool that does what sed and awk do with PCRE2 would be amazing.”
“more features, better performance and is battle tested”
“there are too many corner cases in PCRE”
“I used less + PCRE (for pattern highlighting) for many years for detailed code analysis.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.