Open Radar

 
Summary:

ICU Regular Expressions, including perl's extensions, are available via NSPredicate for matching but cannot be directly used for parsing text in NSString objects or input data streams.

Currently, the only method for parsing strings provided by apple's public API's is via NSScanner.
This is all well and good as long as the format of incoming data is perfectly clean, and has a simple and straight forward structure.

The ability to use (perl's) Regular Expressions greatly simplifies a programmer's abilities to cope with, cater for and correct poorly formed or complex input strings. They would be predestinated for use in NSFormatter's subclasses, for example.

Since the ICU regular expression library is included in OS X, it should be available not only for predicate matching, but also for parsing of strings.

Regression:

To my knowledge, regular expressions have never been provided for parsing texts in Cocoa.