What is the name of vim's regex engine?

Question

Honestly, I find Regex a nightmare mainly due to the variety of engines available to Regex. However, knowing the engine and flavor names of a particular application helps me figure out what syntax I must follow.

For instance, Visual Studio uses the .NET engine. What is the name of vim's regex engine?

edit: As @Matt and @phd explained, flavor != engine. Vim has its own engine, but it has four flavors: nomagic, magic, very nomagic, very magic.

Regexp flavor != regexp engine. Vim has one flavor but two different engines. — Matt, Jul 29 '21 at 05:08
@Matt vim has [4 flavors](http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html#/magic) — nomagic, magic, very nomagic, very magic. Magic is the recommended setting. — phd, Jul 29 '21 at 18:11
@RubemPacelli Roughly speaking, "flavor" is "regex.compile" and "engine" is "regex.exec". — Matt, Jul 30 '21 at 07:16
Not sure why you got downvoted. This community was sick. Just gave you one vote back. (and going to be replaced by chatgpt soon) — NeoZoom.lua, May 10 '23 at 13:48

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 29 '21 at 00:32

Well, I'm not an expert in this topic, but i think my research can be helpful.

What I have found so far is that Vim has it's own RegEx engine and this topic can be informative for you, because there are some explanations to why Vim has it's own engine.

Also on this wiki page you can find what features are supported in Vim.

Hope that I could help you a bit.

What is the name of vim's regex engine?

1 Answers1