Implements a simple regex matcher (to be used by death tests on Windows).

1 files changed, 51 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/gtest/gtest-death-test.h b/include/gtest/gtest-death-test.h
index f0e109a3..1d4cf982 100644
--- a/include/gtest/gtest-death-test.h
+++ b/include/gtest/gtest-death-test.h
@@ -86,6 +86,57 @@ GTEST_DECLARE_string_(death_test_style);
 //
 //   ASSERT_EXIT(client.HangUpServer(), KilledBySIGHUP, "Hanging up!");
 //
+// On the regular expressions used in death tests:
+//
+//   On POSIX-compliant systems (*nix), we use the <regex.h> library,
+//   which uses the POSIX extended regex syntax.
+//
+//   On other platforms (e.g. Windows), we only support a simple regex
+//   syntax implemented as part of Google Test.  This limited
+//   implementation should be enough most of the time when writing
+//   death tests; though it lacks many features you can find in PCRE
+//   or POSIX extended regex syntax.  For example, we don't support
+//   union ("x|y"), grouping ("(xy)"), brackets ("[xy]"), and
+//   repetition count ("x{5,7}"), among others.
+//
+//   Below is the syntax that we do support.  We chose it to be a
+//   subset of both PCRE and POSIX extended regex, so it's easy to
+//   learn wherever you come from.  In the following: 'A' denotes a
+//   literal character, period (.), or a single \\ escape sequence;
+//   'x' and 'y' denote regular expressions; 'm' and 'n' are for
+//   natural numbers.
+//
+//     c     matches any literal character c
+//     \\d   matches any decimal digit
+//     \\D   matches any character that's not a decimal digit
+//     \\f   matches \f
+//     \\n   matches \n
+//     \\r   matches \r
+//     \\s   matches any ASCII whitespace, including \n
+//     \\S   matches any character that's not a whitespace
+//     \\t   matches \t
+//     \\v   matches \v
+//     \\w   matches any letter, _, or decimal digit
+//     \\W   matches any character that \\w doesn't match
+//     \\c   matches any literal character c, which must be a punctuation
+//     .     matches any single character except \n
+//     A?    matches 0 or 1 occurrences of A
+//     A*    matches 0 or many occurrences of A
+//     A+    matches 1 or many occurrences of A
+//     ^     matches the beginning of a string (not that of each line)
+//     $     matches the end of a string (not that of each line)
+//     xy    matches x followed by y
+//
+//   If you accidentally use PCRE or POSIX extended regex features
+//   not implemented by us, you will get a run-time failure.  In that
+//   case, please try to rewrite your regular expression within the
+//   above syntax.
+//
+//   This implementation is *not* meant to be as highly tuned or robust
+//   as a compiled regex library, but should perform well enough for a
+//   death test, which already incurs significant overhead by launching
+//   a child process.
+//
 // Known caveats:
 //
 //   A "threadsafe" style death test obtains the path to the test