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On 27/09/2018 06:39, Sai Manoj Kumar Yadlapati wrote:

Hi all,

Lua supports its own version of regular expression matching.
But it doesn't have the | (pipe symbol) support and the quantifier support
- a{1,5} meaning a can occur anywhere from 1 to 5 times.

Both of these are present in PCRE. I am curious to know why these are not
supported.Is it not supported intentionally or was it never considered?

Thanks
Sai Manoj
To reinforce what Andrew said in his reply: please note that Lua patterns are NOT regular expressions. That is they haven't got the same expressive power as regexes, and that's /by design/. The goal was/is to keep Lua size small.
I can't say if implementing alternation (i.e. that OR operator) will increase Lua size by much, but I suspect it will. 

-- Lorenzo