• Table of contents
• Regular Expressions
• Modifiers
• Differences between .NET and PCRE

Regular Expressions¶

As of 2.9 AdiIRC has built-in support for PCRE2 expressions provided that Visual C++ 2015 is installed for 32 bit AdiIRC or Visual C++ 2015 is installed for 64 bit AdiIRC.

AdiIRC will automatically use PCRE2 if available, although it can be disabled by typing /setoption Misc UsePcre False, in this case AdiIRC will fallback to .NET regular expressions.

AdiIRC uses the .NET regular expression engine, while mIRC uses the PCRE engine, some differences are converted from PCRE to .NET while others are not possible.

Read more about .NET regular expressions:

http://regexhero.net/reference/
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hs600312%28v=vs.110%29.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az24scfc%28v=vs.110%29.aspx
http://www.regular-expressions.info/dotnet.html

Modifiers¶

.NET does not use a /pattern/modifier syntax, but AdiIRC tries to interpret it and remove them from the pattern.

/g /G - Enables global match.
/i /I - Enables case in-sensitive.
/S - Strips any control codes before matching ($hfind will ignore this).
/s - Enables single line match.
/m /M /c /C - Enables multi line match.
/x /X - Eliminates unescaped white space from the pattern.
/U - Enables non greedy mode. (Tries to replace greedy patterns with non greedy patterns + > +?, * -> *?)
/u - Enables UTF8 instead of ASCII regular expression.

Differences between .NET and PCRE¶

AdiIRC translate some patterns from PCRE into .NET patterns.

(*UTF8)/(*UTF) -> Enables UTF8 instead of ASCII regular expression.
(?R) -> .*
(?2) -> .*
(?1) -> .*
++ -> +
[:alnum:] -> a-zA-Z0-9
[:alpha:] -> a-zA-Z
[:ascii:] -> \x00-\x7F
[:blank:] -> \s\t
[:cntrl:] -> \x00-\x1F\x7F
[:digit:] -> 0-9
[:graph:] -> \x21-\x7E
[:lower:] -> a-z
[:print:] -> \x20-\x7E
[:punct:] -> !"#$%&'()*+,\-./:;<=>?@[\\\]^_`{|}~
[:space:] -> \s\t\r\n\v\f
[:upper:] -> A-Z
[:word:] - > A-Za-z0-9_
[:xdigit:] -> A-Fa-f0-9
\cc -> \x003
\co -> \x00F
\cb -> \x002
\x\{([A-Fa-f0-9]{1,4})\} -> \uXXXX
\Q \E tries to escapes all characters in between

\K is not available in .NET, use (<=abc)d instead.

These have no .NET counterpart:

code (?{…})
recursive (R), (R1), (R&name)
define (DEFINE).

List of differences between .NET and PCRE https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3417644/translate-perl-regular-expressions-to-net