How a RegEx engine works?

Question

In learning Regular Expressions it had me wondering how the underlying engine works. Probably more specifically, I'd like to know more about how it evalutates, prioritizies and parses the expression. I am not interested in building an engine, just learning the inner workings of it.

Answer 1

Explaining how a regexp parsing engine works is probably beyond the scope of an answer on such a forum, but since many programming languages are open source, you can look at their source code and how they parse regular expressions. For instance, here is a pointer for Python:

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/re.py