On 2009-02-19 00:35:20 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
auto s = sub("abracazoo", regex("a([b-e])", "g"), "A$1");
I don't like `sub`, I mean the name. Makes me think of substring more
than substitute. My choice would be to reuse what we have in std.string
and augment it to work with regular expressions:
auto s = replace("abracazoo", regex("a([b-e])", "g"), subex("A$1"));
This way it works consistently whether you're using a string or a
regular expression: just replace any pattern string with regex(...) and
any replacement string with subex(...) -- "substition-expression" --
when you want them to be parsed as such. Omitting subex in the above
would make it a plain string replacement for instance (this way it's
easy to place use a variable there).
These functions should allow easy substitution of any string or regex
pattern with another algorithm for matching the pattern.
And there's not way to get a range of matches using std.string, but
there should be, and it should follow the same rule as above:
supporting strings and regex consistently. (Using the `in` operator as
suggested by Bill Baxter seems a good fit for this function.)
And if any of you complains about the extra verbosity, here's what I suggest:
auto s = replace("abracazoo", re"a([b-e])"g, se"A$1");
Yes, syntaxic sugar for declaring regular expressions.
Two other syntactic options are available:
"abracazoo".match(regex("a[b-e]", "g")))
"abracazoo".match("a[b-e]", "g")
I despise the second one, because if you omit regex(...) it makes me
think you're checking for string matches, not expression matches.
There's nothing in the name of the funciton telling you you're dealing
with a regular expression, so it could easily get confusing.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
