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Asked: 2026-05-29T10:58:39+00:00

RE2 is great. Fast and deterministic. However, it supports only UTF8. My strings are

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RE2 is great. Fast and deterministic.

However, it supports only UTF8. My strings are natively UTF16, and converting back and forth would kill performance.

How difficult would it be to implement native UTF16 capability in RE2?

How difficult would it be to implement native UCS-2 capability in RE2? (this should be easier)

i.e. how many hours would a regular programmer need to do this.

This has been bothering me for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would ask!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Russ Cox, the creator of RE2, was kind enough to post the patch for UCS-2 support. Some assertions, however, are not supported for UCS-2. Reply from Russ is posted verbatim:

    Hi. RE2 had a UCS-2 mode before I open sourced it, but it could not
    support assertions like ^, $, and \b, which limited its utility. If
    you don’t need those operators, then it would probably work for you.
    I don’t plan to re-add UCS-2 mode to the RE2 sources, but I did just
    publish the diff for the change that removed it. You should be able
    to reverse the diff in a local copy to get the UCS-2 support back.
    The file is ucs2.diff in the root of the Mercurial repository.

    Enjoy.

    Link to code: http://code.google.com/p/re2/source/list

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