State of the Regex 2026
Unicode regular expressions are defined in Unicode Technical Standard #18, but real-world support varies significantly across programming languages, libraries, and regex engines. Over the past decade, Unicode regex support has advanced substantially, especially through ECMAScript standardization and modern JavaScript implementations, but important gaps remain. This session will review the current state of Unicode regular expression support in widely used regex engines, with a focus on practical engineering use cases: what works today, what differs across platforms, and where future implementation work would have the greatest impact. I presented Unicode Regular Expression Engines at IUC38 in 2014, comparing support for Unicode regex features across technologies. This 2026 session revisits that landscape after more than a decade of progress and asks: how far have we come, and what is still missing?