I love perl's (?{ code }) feature. I want it in other languages.

I spent some time on hacking this into ruby a few weeks ago. I finally got around to making patches.

In FreeBSD ports, I select to build Ruby 1.8.6 with oniguruma for the regex engine. After doing 'make configure' you can apply these patches:

• patch-ruby1.8.6-regcomp.c
• patch-ruby1.8.6-regexec.c
• patch-ruby1.8.6-regparse.c

I haven't tested this on other platforms, and it's not feature complete, but it's close.

Hop on over to the grok project page and download the new version.

The changelist from the previous announced release is as follows:

Changes for 20070915:

  * Added 'grok_patfind.pl' which adds 'grok -F' functionality. Read about it
    here:
    http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/geekery/grok-pattern-autodiscovery.html

  * Proper shutdown is called to kill the "hack" subprocess
  * Add 'shell' option to 'type' sections; not currently used.
  * Warn if we're trying to override an existing filter.
  * Added more perlthoughts to t/theory/

  * Numerous pattern regex changes:
    - NUMBER no longer uses Regexp::Common's real number regex since that one
      matches '.' and my thoughts are that '.' is not a number
    - Added POSITIVENUM pattern
    - Fix HOSTNAME to match hostnames starting with a number (Again,
      Regexp::Common fails me)
    - Add path patterns: UNIXPATH, WINPATH, URI
    - MONTH no longer matches 0 through 12
    - DAY no longer matches 0 through 6
    - SYSLOGPROG is more specific now, since valid prog names can have dashes.