XPCOM:nsIRegExpService

[Bug 106590] covers implementing a nsIRegExpService for XPCOM. Various modules - such as Web Forms 2.0 and XForms - need functionality like this. In addition, some C++ operations would benefit from having this supported.

This page is for discussing how to actually solve bug 106590.

Use Cases

• http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/extensions/schema-validation/src/nsSchemaValidatorRegexp.js uses XPCOM to reach JavaScript for regular expression services.

• http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#the-pattern requires for the pattern attribute of HTML form inputs that validation happen according to the ECMA-262 specification. (WF2 cannot immediately use the schema-validation process, because WF2 would be built much earlier than schema-validation... not to mention that schema-validation is currently an extension.)