A RegexBuddy user pointed me to LIB_MYSQLUDF_PREG. This is an open source library of MySQL user functions that imports the PCRE library.
MySQL’s built-in regular expression support uses the POSIX ERE flavor. By todays standards, that flavor offers limited regex functionality. PCRE on the other hand offers all the goodies from Perl and [...]

Zero-length matches are often an unintended result of mistakenly making everything optional in a regular expression. Sometimes they can be useful. In browsers like Firefox, zero-length matches can cause your JavaScript code to loop forever on regex.exec().

Backtracking occurs when the regular expression engine encounters a regex token that does not match the next character in the string. The regex engine will then back up part of what it matched so far, to try different alternatives and/or repetitions. Understanding this process will make all the difference between guessing and understanding [...]

The general rule is to only escape a character only if it really has to be escaped.

The wxRegEx class in the wxWidgets library encapsulates the Advanced Regular Expressions engine developed by Tcl. I’ve added a page of detailed documentation for this class to www.regexp.info. RegexBuddy now includes a template for generating C++ source code snippets using wxRegEx.