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Taming Regular Expressions

Despite their power, regular expressions come with their own challenges. First of all, they have a tendency to quickly become unreadable, so that understanding them becomes a matter of deobfuscation. Furthermore learning how to use them involves a steep curve as they've always been difficult to master.

Simple Regex Language, is the latest addition to the many solutions already at large. An open source project on GitHub, under the MIT License, it takes the radical approach of targeting the very "language" that we use to write regular expressions, completely replacing it with a domain specific counterpart.

But first, let's take a deeper look into the domain specific problem that SRL tries to alleviate. To address the primary issue of unreadability, the /x modifier was introduced, which allowed for the inclusion of white space, line breaks as well as commenting in the regex itself. Under /x the regex engine wouldn't treat those elements as part of the expression to match, therefore allowing their use for the purposes of indentation and self-description.

full article on i-programmer.info
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