(Originally asked at [[Wikipedia talk:Searching]] and [[WP:VPT]].)
Is there any existing way to search Wikipedia or MediaWiki in general using full-fledged regular expressions? Such as those found in Perl, PCRE, Python, JavaScript?
I started writing a Perl program that uses Parse::MediaWikiDump, goes over a dump and searches for regexes, but there are two problems with this:
1. Such a program probably already exists, although i don't know where. Can anyone point me to an existing tool? It can be in any other language, not necessarily Perl, but it should be portable - not Windows-only/Mac-only/Linux-only.
2. The info won't be up-to-date. Would it be too much to ask to search the database directly using regexes?
If problem number 2 is too hard to solve and nobody knows the answer to problem number one, then i guess that i'll publish my Perl dump searching program for the common good. (Why not Python? Because i know Perl better and Parse::MediaWikiDump works well enough for me.)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni
"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore