Question

Is it possible to execute a regular expression within certain timeframe? For example, we execute regex r and we wait for it to finish maximum 5 seconds, otherwise we cancel. Is this something anyone has experience with?

Answer 1

i’m not quite sure what you mean by “execute”, but in certain cases it’s possible to turn a blocking operation into a loop:

s = "long thing"
re = /[a-z]/g

// blocks
matches = s.match(re)

// doesn't block
matches = []
while(m = re.exec(s)) {
 matches.push(m[0])
 do your time check here
}