It is possible to link your application through C to an
interpreter like Python or Perl, and rely on the built-in
regular expression libraries to do your work. If you
really wanted to, you could fire off a call to /usr/bin/egrep.
These are all part of the default Mac OS X platform, they
require no dependency on a bundled framework, and have no
license issues.
In all honesty, you wouldn't want Apple to "implement" this
itself, because they'd have to start from scratch and there
would be bugs. I listed 3 implementations that are very
mature and powerful.
The main downside in each case is that you're converting a
small amount of code and strings to the target form (command
line, Python or Perl code).
Kevin G.
As someone who has worked on a number of 3rd party [open source and
otherwise] frameworks, I wonder where this attitude comes from in
the case
of Cocoa/Mac OS X. I have some ideas, but I hesitate to share them.
Four things:
1) There are certain basics like regex support that people are upset
at Apple for not implementing because it seems like such an important
part of the concept of strings.
2) Licensing issues can arise for third-party frameworks.
3) Objective-C has no namespaces, and categories are fragile.
4) Linking against a third-party framework requires distributing the
framework inside the app bundle. Look at the proliferation of
Sparkle.framework to see why this is a Bad Thing(TM).
--Kyle Sluder
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