A RegexBuddy user pointed me to LIB_MYSQLUDF_PREG. This is an open source library of MySQL user functions that imports the PCRE library.

MySQL’s built-in regular expression support uses the POSIX ERE flavor. By todays standards, that flavor offers limited regex functionality. PCRE on the other hand offers all the goodies from Perl and other modern regex flavors.

If you want to work with LIB_MYSQLUDF_PREG, you’ll need to set the regex flavor to PCRE. Use the “PHP preg operator” string style when copying and pasting regular expressions. This will format regex as '/regex/' as required by LIB_MYSQLUDF_PREG.

I haven’t tried to use LIB_MYSQLUDF_PREG myself. I don’t have access to a MySQL server where I can install such libraries.

If you want RegexBuddy to generate source code snippets for LIB_MYSQLUDF_PREG, you can edit the provided MySQL template. Change the regex flavor to PCRE and the string style to PHP/preg. Then edit the functions to use the PREG_* calls instead of MySQL’s built-in operators. Save your custom template, and share it on the RegexBuddy user forum.