After declaring a wrapper for pcre.replace:

sql>create function pcre_replace(s string, pattern string, repl string, flags string) returns string external name pcre."replace";

operation successful (6.187ms)

I cannot get replacements with references to captures work (but the code in pcre.c seems to support it):

sql>select pcre_replace('Apple Pear', '^([a-zA-Z]+)\\s*([a-zA-Z]+)$', '\\1 \\2', '');

+---------------------------+

| pcre_replace_single_value |

+===========================+

| \1 \2                     |

+---------------------------+

1 tuple (0.309ms)

The pattern is matched, but the back references are replaced literally.

Am I not getting the syntax correct?

From http://www.pcre.org/original/doc/html/pcresyntax.html I see I could use any of \1, \g1, \g{1] for back references, but none seem to work.

Roberto