> Regarding "RegEx", I'm pretty certain Brendan was talking about a > hypothetical new library (name unimportant) that the JavaScript community > might create in the future. I don't think anyone has suggested adding a
I worked on something like this: http://code.google.com/p/json-pattern/ . It is more a rethinking of regular expressions than just fixing existing bugs. It is somewhat dormant now; I planned to port it to JavaScript (from Python) but unfortunately haven't gotten around to it. The lack of standard /y definitely blocks it. I guess I will have to just use the proprietary /y extension for now. My belief is that regular expressions are hobbled by their syntax. If they didn't have such bad syntax (^ means either negation or the start of a string; you sometimes negate with ^ and sometimes negate with capitalization, the whole (? nightmare,etc. ), then people would write large, useful and fast regexes and no one would bat an eye. Highlights: - You can capture an entire (recursive) JSON structure with named and repeated elements (a generalization of named capture). JavaScript currently just allows you to capture individual numbered values. - There are extensible filters (pipes) for converting values. You can capture \d+ to the number 3 rather than the string "3"; you can write a filter to convert "3-2-2009" to a Date() instance, etc. - Pattern reuse / composition (nicer than Perl's) - More readable and more consistent syntax (I wasn't completely happy with where I ended up, but I have some unimplemented improvments) Here is an example of a single expression that parses 'ls -al' output: http://chubot.org/json-pattern/test-cases/testLs.html . It's interesting that regular expression syntax in computers has been evolving continuously for over 40 years now. It's probably older than any language still in common use except perhaps FORTRAN. Andy _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
