Regular expression converter.

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Before I re-invent the wheel ...

Has anyone here written or obtained an elisp function or macro that will
convert perl-like regular expressions into Emacs regexp's?

I know this isn't strictly a Gnus question, but I have a feeling that
someone here might already be using something like this.

As an example, this proposed function/macro would convert the expression
marked as "Perl" to the one marked "Emacs" (note that I'm writing these
as if they would appear inside of an Elisp string, and therefore, the
backslashes are all doubled):

  Perl:   ^(.+?\\.)+(com|net|org)$
  Emacs:  ^\\(.+?\\.\\)+\\(com\\|net\\|org\\)$

If the input contains any perl-isms that can't be converted to an
appropriate Emacs regexp construct, I don't mind if this function fails.
My main goal is to use a regular expression syntax with fewer
backslashes in my elisp code, in order to aid readablility and speed up
debugging.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com