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Use System.Text.RegularExpressions with Delphi for .NET

When developing Borland Delphi WinForms and VCL.NET applications, you can access all classes that are part of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), including System.Text.RegularExpressions. Simply add this namespace to the uses clause, and you can access the .NET regex classes such as Regex, Match and Group. You can use them with Delphi just as they can be used by C# and VB developers.

PCRE-based Components for Delphi for Windows/Win32

If your application is a good old Windows application using the Win32 API, you obviously cannot use the regex support from the .NET framework. Delphi itself does not provide a regular expression library, so you will need to use a third party VCL component. I recommend that you use a component that is based on the open source PCRE library. This is a very fast library, written in C. The regex syntax it supports is very complete. There are a few Delphi components that implement regular expressions purely in Delphi. Though that may sound like an advantage, the pure Delphi libraries I have seen do not support a full-featured modern regex syntax.

There are many PCRE-based VCL components available. Most are free, some are not. Some compile PCRE into a DLL that you need to ship along with your application, others link the PCRE OBJ files directly into your Delphi EXE.

One such component is TPerlRegEx, which I developed myself. You can download TPerlRegEx for free from this website. TPerlRegEx Delphi source, PCRE C sources, PCRE OBJ files and DLL are included. You can choose to link the OBJ files directly into your application, or to use the DLL. TPerlRegEx has full support for regex search-and-replace and regex splitting, which PCRE does not. Full documentation is included with the download as a help file.

RegexBuddy's Win32 Delphi code snippets are based on the TPerlRegEx component.

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