From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2006-11-13T04:20:07+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expression too big

On Sun, 12 Nov 2006 15:25:49 +0100, Peter Schrammel wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> got  problem with big regexes:
> I have a regex of about 70000+ words concated with '|' that I'd like to
> match as a regex. /bla|blub|foo|bar|.....(70000)/
> 
> But unfortunately ruby gives me a 'regular expression too big' if I'm
> trying to build such a thing.
> I had a look at the regex.c code and saw the limit of 1 << 16 bytes for
> regexes. Is there a way around this (without going down to 2000 words) ?
> 
> Thanks for any hint
> 
> Peter

Maybe a trie would be useful?
http://rubyforge.org/projects/trie/
(or there's another trie at http://kzk9.net/software/miscprograms/ruby/)

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/