Sounds like an excellent suggestion to me. I'm aware of some implementation tests this would end up breaking, but no 'real world' code per-se.
My best, Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Peter van der Zee Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 4:30 AM To: es-discuss Subject: Regex on substrings A problem I faced recently is the inability to apply regular expressions to a substring of a string without explicitly taking the substring first. So I'm wondering how much trouble it would be to extend the RegExp api to this... RegExp.prototype.test = function(string[, start=0[, stop=string.length]]){ }; RegExp.prototype.exec = function(string[, start=0[, stop=string.length]]){ }; The regular expression would only be applied to that part of the string. It'd be (almost) the same as regex.test(string.substring(start, stop)), except the substringing is handled internally. I can't think of any backward compatibility issues for this change. My use case is that I have a set of words I want to find in a certain input string, but almost always starting at pos>0. Right now I have to take the substring of the longest possible match (or remaining of input) and check the results of exec/match to see the length of the match, if any. The alternative is to compile a regular expression that "skips" the first n characters. Optionally, it might be handy to have .test return a number, indicating the length of the (first) match. If zero, there was no match. This would however break with scripts that explicitly check for === false. It seems to me like applying regular expressions to substrings could be optimized internally much better (using pointers) than having to do a substring in ES every time. This should speed up the parsing of input, for instance. - peter _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
