“ObjPCRE is a well documented PCRE wrapper written in 100% Objective-C/C. It can be easily implemented into any Cocoa application. (MIT License)” (from cocoadev).
The code is just two files: objpcre.h and objpcre.m. They are easily compiled “in-tree”, and don’t look like some big ugly crap that I have to carry around. “-lpcre” is ok for MacOS and Linux, so not a problem too.
Regular expressions problem solved. Back to more interesting things