Nimpcre is a Nim wrapper for the PCRE library.
While PCRE is already available within Nim, this module makes it easy to statically compile PCRE into the resulting binary instead of relying on an external DLL or binary.
Nimpcre is distributed as a Nimble package and depends on nimterop.
Installation
Nimpcre can be installed via Nimble:
> nimble install nimpcre
This will download and install nimpcre in the standard Nimble package location, typically ~/.nimble. Once installed, it can be imported into any Nim program.
import nimpcre
import re
echo "abc".match(re"a.+")NOTE: The -d:usePcreHeader flag needs to be specified to the Nim compiler in order to remove the dependency on the external DLL. This can also be accomplished by using a nim.cfg or test.cfg in the same directory as the code being compiled.
On Windows, building PCRE will be simpler with cmake which can be installed with nimble install cmake. This will download and shim the cmake executable for convenience. Without cmake, the autotools suite will be needed since PCRE does not ship with a ready configure script. This will require a full MSYS setup.
cmake on Windows also requires a working bash which is already shipped with git. However, git is typically installed in Program Files and has a space in the path which breaks cmake. A workaround is to have git installed to another path.
nim c -d:usePcreHeader -r test.nim
Credits
Nimpcre wraps the PCRE source code and all licensing terms of PCRE apply to the usage of this package.
Feedback
Nimpcre is a work in progress and any feedback or suggestions are welcome. It is hosted on GitHub with an MIT license so issues, forks and PRs are most appreciated.