The Just Great Software Regular Expression Engine

The Just Great Software (JGsoft) regular expression engine is designed and developed by Jan Goyvaerts, who is also the author of this regular expression tutorial. This engine is the core of the Just Great Software products PowerGREP (version 3 and later) and RegexBuddy (version 2 and later). It also powers the regular expression search functions in EditPad Pro (version 6 and later) and AceText (version 2 and later). Earlier versions of PowerGREP, RegexBuddy and EditPad Pro were based on PCRE.

This engine and its regular expression flavor were specifically developed for PowerGREP and RegexBuddy. As you can see in the regex flavor comparison, the JGsoft flavor offers a blend of all the features found in the most popular regular expression flavors. It fully supports Unicode and a wide range of legacy code pages. The engine in PowerGREP can process files larger than 4GB without splitting the files in arbitrary chunks.

RegexBuddy 3 has a special version of the JGsoft engine that can simulate the limitations and flavor-specific features of many other regular expression flavors. When you select a regex flavor in RegexBuddy, all of RegexBuddy's features will use that flavor. Even the built-in grep.

The JGsoft engine is not available as a component that can be embedded into other applications. It was specifically designed to work within Just Great Software products, rather than as a general-purpose engine. Unless you're developing a tool like PowerGREP or RegexBuddy in which regular expressions are the core functionality, the regex flavor already provided by your development environment will be more than sufficient. Just do your users a favor and state very clearly which regex flavor your application uses. Then they can easily look up the specifics on this site.

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