Golang : error parsing regexp: invalid or unsupported Perl syntax

Compiling and running Golang program will throw out some odd error messages sometimes. Got one today with this error message below while testing out regular expressions in Golang :

error parsing regexp: invalid or unsupported Perl syntax: (?!

Apparently it was because Perl syntax and negative lookahead is not supported in Golang. Golang's Regular Expression syntax is different from PCRE's (which is used by php and javascript ).

To fix this you can either convert your regular expression to non-Perl syntax style or install https://github.com/tuxychandru/golang-pkg-pcre/

If you requirement is not too complex, you can also consider the Golang unicode package. There are couple of functions such as IsDigit, IsNumber and IsPunct that might be useful.