regex VS ripgrep

Compare regex vs ripgrep and see what are their differences.

regex

An implementation of regular expressions for Rust. This implementation uses finite automata and guarantees linear time matching on all inputs. (by rust-lang)

ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore (by BurntSushi)
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regex ripgrep
91 348
3,345 44,901
2.1% -
9.1 9.3
4 days ago 3 days ago
Rust Rust
Apache License 2.0 The Unlicense
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

regex

Posts with mentions or reviews of regex. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-24.
  • Zed is now open source
    26 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2024
    The homepage has a benchmark that compares Zed's "insertion latency" to other editors, and this is the description:

    > Open input.rs at the end of line 21 in rust-lang/regex. Type z 10 times, measure how long it takes for each z to display since hitting the z key.

    Could someone clarify what that means? My interpretation of that was to go to https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/blob/master/regex-cli/arg... and start typing 'z' at the end of line 21, but that doesn't seem to make any sense. I guess that repo got refactored and those instructions are out of date?

  • CryptoFlow: Building a secure and scalable system with Axum and SvelteKit - Part 3
    3 projects | dev.to | 8 Jan 2024
    We also used the avenue to sluggify the question title. We used regex to fish out and replace all occurrences of punctuation and symbol characters with an empty string and using the itertools crate, we joined the words back together into a single string, where each word is separated by a hyphen ("-").
  • Command Line Rust is a great book
    4 projects | /r/rust | 8 Dec 2023
    Command-Line Rust taught me how to use crates like clap, assert_cmd, and regex. I felt lost before because I didn't know about Rust's ecosystem--which is arguably as important as the language itself. Also, looking up and comparing libraries is a tiring task! blessed.rs is nice but Command-Line Rust really saved me from analysis paralysis.
  • Common Rust Lifetime Misconceptions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Dec 2023
    burntsushi actually regrets making regex replace return a Cow: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/676#issuecomment-6.... I’m glad it does, and wish it took an impl Into> there, for the reasons discussed in the issue, but burntsushi has a lot more experience of the practical outcomes of this. Just something more to think about.
  • Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Dec 2023
    I'm not familiar with the AoC problem. You might be able to. But RegexSet doesn't give you match offsets.

    You can drop down to regex-automata, which does let you do multi-regex search and it will tell you which patterns match[1]. The docs have an example of a simple lexer[2]. But... that will only give you non-overlapping matches.

    You can drop down to an even lower level of abstraction and get multi-pattern overlapping matches[3], but it's awkward. The comment there explains that I had initially tried to provide a higher level API for it, but was unsure of what the semantics should be. Getting the starting position in particular is a bit of a wrinkle.

    [1]: https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/in...

    [2]: https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/st...

    [3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/blob/837fd85e79fac2a4ea64...

  • Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Oct 2023
    It’s not quite that simple, but folks are working on it.

    https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/425#issuecomment-1...

    https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/211#issuecomment-...

  • Please ask questions (rust-lang/regex)
    1 project | /r/hypeurls | 30 Aug 2023
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2023
  • ScripterC - Rust-lang set
    2 projects | /r/scripterc | 13 Aug 2023
    Dependencies used: - regex - unicode_reader - rust decimal - tokio
  • Regex Engine Internals as a Library
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jul 2023
    https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall19/cos226/l... and https://kean.blog/post/lets-build-regex are excellent introductions to implementing a (very) simplified regex engine: construct a nondetermistic finite state automaton for the regex, then perform a graph search on the resulting digraph; if the vertex corresponding to your end state is reachable, you have a match.

    I think this exercise is valuable for anyone writing regexes to not only understand that there's less magic than one might think, but also to visualize a bunch of balls bouncing along an NFA - that bug you inevitably hit in production due to catastrophic backtracking now takes on a physical meaning!

    Separately re: the OP, https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/822 (and specifically BurntSushi's comment at the very end of the issue) adds really useful context to the paragraph in the OP about niche APIs: https://blog.burntsushi.net/regex-internals/#problem-request... - searching with multiple regexes simultaneously against a text is both incredibly complex and incredibly useful, and I can't wait to see what the community comes up with for this pattern!

ripgrep

Posts with mentions or reviews of ripgrep. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-17.
  • Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  • Code Search Is Hard
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2024
    Basic code searching skills seems like something new developers are never explicitly taught, but which is an absolutely crucial skill to build early on.

    I guess the knowledge progression I would recommend would look something kind this:

    - Learning about Ctrl+F, which works basically everywhere.

    - Transitioning to ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - I wouldn't even call this optional, it's truly an incredible and very discoverable tool. Requires keeping a terminal open, but that's a good thing for a newbie!

    - Optional, but highly recommended: Learning one of the powerhouse command line editors. Teenage me recommended Emacs; current me recommends vanilla vim, purely because some flavor of it is installed almost everywhere. This is so that you can grep around and edit in the same window.

    - In the same vein, moving back from ripgrep and learning about good old fashioned grep, with a few flags rg uses by default: `grep -r` for recursive search, `grep -ri` for case insensitive recursive search, and `grep -ril` for case insensitive recursive "just show me which files this string is found in" search. Some others too, season to taste.

    - Finally hitting the wall with what ripgrep can do for you and switching to an actual indexed, dedicated code search tool.

  • Level Up Your Dev Workflow: Conquer Web Development with a Blazing Fast Neovim Setup (Part 1)
    12 projects | dev.to | 16 Mar 2024
    live grep: ripgrep
  • Ripgrep
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
  • Modern Java/JVM Build Practices
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
    The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

    Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

    Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

    rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

    ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

    socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

  • Ugrep – a more powerful, ultra fast, user-friendly, compatible grep
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2023
    I'm not clear on why you're seeing the results you are. It could be because your haystack is so small that you're mostly just measuring noise. ripgrep 14 did introduce some optimizations in workloads like this by reducing match overhead, but I don't think it's anything huge in this case. (And I just tried ripgrep 13 on the same commands above and the timings are similar if a tiny bit slower.)

    [1]: https://github.com/radare/ired

    [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions/2597

  • Tell HN: My Favorite Tools
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
  • Potencializando Sua Experiência no Linux: Conheça as Ferramentas em Rust para um Desenvolvimento Eficiente
    5 projects | dev.to | 12 Dec 2023
    Explore o Ripgrep no repositório oficial: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  • Scrybble is the ReMarkable highlights to Obsidian exporter I have been looking for
    9 projects | /r/RemarkableTablet | 7 Dec 2023
    🔎🗃️ ripgrep or ugrep (search fast, use regex patterns or fuzzy search, pipe output to bash/zsh shell for further processing V coloring)
  • RFC: Add ngram indexing support to ripgrep (2020)
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing regex and ripgrep you can also consider the following projects:

re2 - modern regular expression syntax everywhere with a painless upgrade path [Moved to: https://github.com/SonOfLilit/kleenexp]

telescope-live-grep-args.nvim - Live grep with args

node-re2 - node.js bindings for RE2: fast, safe alternative to backtracking regular expression engines.

fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

ugrep - NEW ugrep 5.1: an ultra fast, user-friendly, compatible grep. Ugrep combines the best features of other grep, adds new features, and searches fast. Includes a TUI and adds Google-like search, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches nested archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and more

ngrams - (Read-only) Generate n-grams

the_silver_searcher - A code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster.

regex-benchmark - It's just a simple regex benchmark of different programming languages.

fzf - :cherry_blossom: A command-line fuzzy finder

whatlang-rs - Natural language detection library for Rust. Try demo online: https://whatlang.org/

alacritty - A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.