Raku: The match of a regex is automatically stored in $/, and this variable then also provides access to the text before ($/.prematch), to the text after ($/.postmatch), and to the match's position ($/.from and $/.to). Nice.

https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes#Literals_and_metacharacters

#raku #rakulang #regularexpressions #regex #regexes

Parser Combinators Beat Regexes

https://entropicthoughts.com/parser-combinators-beat-regexes

#HackerNews #ParserCombinators #Regexes #CodingTechniques #FunctionalProgramming

At a past position, the team I was on had a #regex that was several kilobytes in length in several products. It was the stuff of nightmares!   We only managed by splitting their definition strings into multiple pieces that were assembled kind of like a puzzle.  

That said, it was also an amazing learning experience and taught me about things to be extremely careful about, like don’t go too deep with the nesting of groups, and definitely don’t sprinkle deeply nested groups with the Kleene star or anything else that is unbound in length or repetition.   

(I still love #RegularExpressions for their power, though.  )

#RegularExpression #regexes #work

#BadApple #demo in #vim only using search queries (6,500 #regexes)

https://eieio.games/blog/bad-apple-with-regex-in-vim/

#demoscene #regex #neovim

Never before had I considered the importance of "greedy" and "lazy" options for #regular expression matches. By default, regular expression engines try to match the maximum of a chain of characters, but for years I used #regexes not knowing the difference between "x?" and "+?". In one case the question mark says that "x" is optional, in the other, says that searching should stop as soon as a match was found. Clearly explained here and very important:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2301285/what-do-lazy-and-greedy-mean-in-the-context-of-regular-expressions