Chimera: A regular expression matcher with full PCRE semantics
Chimera is a new pattern matching engine from Sensory Networks, designed solely for high-performance block mode scanning with full libpcre semantics.
It combines HyperScan's core engine with a number of other matchers, presenting a similar, consistent interface but providing additional functionality that is unavailable from HyperScan alone. Chimera is ideal for applications that need to scan blocks of data against large sets of regular expressions, but which need all of the capturing group information provided by the popular PCRE library.
Capturing Groups
Unlike HyperScan, which simply reports the location at which a match for a complete pattern was found, the Chimera matcher has full support for PCRE's capturing groups. This allows Chimera it to report the precise start and end locations of defined "groups" within a pattern. This is useful for applications that need to perform simple post-match processing or feature extraction.
Full Pattern Support
Chimera has full support for the range of regular expression constructs used by the popular PCRE library.
Easy to Integrate
Chimera presents a similar interface to that provided by HyperScan, and shares many of the same advantages in terms of performance and flexibility.
Highly Portable
Like HyperScan, Chimera is extremely portable and already runs on a large variety of processor architectures and operating systems.