https://github.com/kkos/oniguruma">https://github.com/kkos/oniguruma) has sadly been discontinued so we need to find another regex implementation. PCRE2 seem like a good candidate. vendor/pcre2 commit is at tag pcre2-10.47 --with-pcre2 works like this: (similar to --with-oniguruma) builtin - build vendored pcre2 no - no regexp support yes - use pcre2-config to find installed pcre2 (default) * - use value as install prefix to find installecd pcre2 if fail to find installed pcre2 then use vendored Known TODOs: - compile-ios.sh - Needs to be a 1.x release as docs relay on that - libjq usage? dont builtin and require libpcre2? (seems to be what debian does) - Update docs - Breaking changes - Drop "l" modifier? - Could possibly reimplement - Empty pattern and multi-byte code points behave differntly. I think pcre2 is more correct? - onig: jq -n '["🚀" | match(""; "g")] | length' -> 5 (per byte it seems) - pcre2: jq -n '["🚀" | match(""; "g")] | length' -> 2 (per code point) Good references: - https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/blob/master/src/pcre2demo.c Pre pcre2_next_match usage: - https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/blob/eb3bd3cf1418cb1a0eabf984b0b1e80b6bdd9314~1/src/pcre2demo.c (pre pcre2_next_match usage) - pcre2test cli tools is a good Playaround for pcre2 Notes: ".+?\\b" test disbled in pcre2.test seems to be behaves differently depending on pcre2 version. I suspect this fix in 10.43: PCRE2Project/pcre2@0a55280 I noticed a clang -fsanitize=memory use-of-uninitialized-valu issue but it seems to go awa with pcre2 master Related to jqlang#3313

Commits

Commits on Mar 21, 2026

Switch to PCRE2 for regular expressions