Hands up?

I do too.

What if we collected the most used and needed regexps? They could be precompiled, and maybe put as part of Phobos?

Stuff like

 - find next number
 - find next float
 - find next identifier
 - find next URL
 - find next filename (one for windows, unix, etc.)
 - find next _valid_ http tag
 - find next regexp


The last one would be cool. While I could never write one, I bet there is one on the internet somewhere!!

What other regexps would be nice? Those that are harder to write would be most valuable, I think.

This would save a lot of time when coding.

Why invent the wheel over and over! ??

Hi, George,

Here is (on the clip) my collection of url REs used in http://BlockNote.net
.
I think it make sense to include them. Pretty frequently used these days.

Andrew.


"Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:4235751B.5020009@nospam.org...
> Hands up?
>
> I do too.
>
> What if we collected the most used and needed regexps? They could be precompiled, and maybe put as part of Phobos?
>
> Stuff like
>
>  - find next number
>  - find next float
>  - find next identifier
>  - find next URL
>  - find next filename (one for windows, unix, etc.)
>  - find next _valid_ http tag
>  - find next regexp
>
>
> The last one would be cool. While I could never write one, I bet there is one on the internet somewhere!!
>
> What other regexps would be nice? Those that are harder to write would be most valuable, I think.
>
> This would save a lot of time when coding.
>
> Why invent the wheel over and over! ??

Hand down.

I think built-in regex's work well in PERL, in fact maybe one of its most powerful features, but it serves such a specific purpose I dont think it would fit well in a general purpose language like D.  How many of us have used regex's in a compiled language ?  How many feel the Regex class is insufficient ?

Charlie

"Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:4235751B.5020009@nospam.org...
> Hands up?
>
> I do too.
>
> What if we collected the most used and needed regexps? They could be precompiled, and maybe put as part of Phobos?
>
> Stuff like
>
>   - find next number
>   - find next float
>   - find next identifier
>   - find next URL
>   - find next filename (one for windows, unix, etc.)
>   - find next _valid_ http tag
>   - find next regexp
>
>
> The last one would be cool. While I could never write one, I bet there is one on the internet somewhere!!
>
> What other regexps would be nice? Those that are harder to write would be most valuable, I think.
>
> This would save a lot of time when coding.
>
> Why invent the wheel over and over! ??

Charles wrote:
> Hand down.
> 
> I think built-in regex's work well in PERL, in fact maybe one of its most
> powerful features, but it serves such a specific purpose I dont think it
> would fit well in a general purpose language like D.  How many of us have
> used regex's in a compiled language ?  How many feel the Regex class is
> insufficient ?

Well, in a language like D that treats strings as char[] one would not need to have substring, trim, and other functions. You can always write them when needed.

Since D provides them, it would only be natural to provide the most used regexps.

Excellent!

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> Hi, George,
> 
> Here is (on the clip) my collection of url REs used in http://BlockNote.net .
> I think it make sense to include them. Pretty frequently used these days.
> 
> Andrew.
> 
> 
> "Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:4235751B.5020009@nospam.org...
> 
>>Hands up?
>>
>>I do too.
>>
>>What if we collected the most used and needed regexps? They could be
>>precompiled, and maybe put as part of Phobos?
>>
>>Stuff like
>>
>> - find next number
>> - find next float
>> - find next identifier
>> - find next URL
>> - find next filename (one for windows, unix, etc.)
>> - find next _valid_ http tag
>> - find next regexp
>>
>>
>>The last one would be cool. While I could never write one, I bet there
>>is one on the internet somewhere!!
>>
>>What other regexps would be nice? Those that are harder to write would
>>be most valuable, I think.
>>
>>This would save a lot of time when coding.
>>
>>Why invent the wheel over and over! ?? 
> 
> 
> 

Oh I'm sorry I thought this thread was a contituation of putting built-in regexp support like PERL into D.  If its just adding existing regular expression Im all for it :D.

Charlie

"Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:42360AE1.40709@nospam.org...
> Charles wrote:
> > Hand down.
> >
> > I think built-in regex's work well in PERL, in fact maybe one of its
most
> > powerful features, but it serves such a specific purpose I dont think it would fit well in a general purpose language like D.  How many of us
have
> > used regex's in a compiled language ?  How many feel the Regex class is insufficient ?
>
> Well, in a language like D that treats strings as char[] one would not need to have substring, trim, and other functions. You can always write them when needed.
>
> Since D provides them, it would only be natural to provide the most used regexps.

"Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:4235751B.5020009@nospam.org...
> Hands up?
> Stuff like
>  - find next number
>  - find next float
>  - find next identifier
>  - find next URL
>  - find next filename (one for windows, unix, etc.)
>  - find next _valid_ http tag
>  - find next regexp
> This would save a lot of time when coding.
> Why invent the wheel over and over! ??

These sound very interesting, but.. mind explaining their use to those of us not so acquainted with them?  I'm sure there are several windows users here who have never used Perl and have no idea what a regexp is for.  I know it's a kind of string pattern-matching, but what use would it serve in a programming language?

And if it does what I think it does, wouldn't it be a sort of.. preprocessor?

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:31:34 -0500, Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

> "Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:4235751B.5020009@nospam.org...
>> Hands up?
>> Stuff like
>>  - find next number
>>  - find next float
>>  - find next identifier
>>  - find next URL
>>  - find next filename (one for windows, unix, etc.)
>>  - find next _valid_ http tag
>>  - find next regexp
>> This would save a lot of time when coding.
>> Why invent the wheel over and over! ??
> 
> These sound very interesting, but.. mind explaining their use to those of us not so acquainted with them?  I'm sure there are several windows users here who have never used Perl and have no idea what a regexp is for.  I know it's a kind of string pattern-matching, but what use would it serve in a programming language?
> 
> And if it does what I think it does, wouldn't it be a sort of.. preprocessor?

They are very handy for applications that do a *lot* of text processing, but I don't think that they warrant being built-in to the language. Library routines ought to suffice. In fact, I'm sure that if they were built-in, they would only be syntax sweeteners for library calls anyway. That is, the dmd compiler would insert a call to a library routine to perform the requested functionality. Ok, with regexp literals it would do this at compile time rather than at run time, but that is not going to be a world-beating performance improvement.

I suspect an interface into the PCRE library ( http://www.pcre.org/ ) will suit nearly all needs in this area.

-- 
Derek Parnell
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.dsource.org/projects/build/
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?FrontPage
15/03/2005 2:05:02 PM

In article <d15h9v$29i$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Jarrett Billingsley says...
>mind explaining their use to those of us not so acquainted with them?  I'm sure there are several windows users here who have never used Perl and have no idea what a regexp is for.  I know it's a kind of string pattern-matching, but what use would it serve in a programming language?

Gladly. :)

The thumbnail sketch of a regexp is basically the world's most compact parser languge.  It makes relatively sizable parsing chores a breeze, by offloading all the messy details to a common syntax and a runtime engine to support it.

Wikipedia has all the gory details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

"A regular expression (abbreviated as regexp, regex or regxp) is a string that describes or matches a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. Regular expressions are used by many text editors and utilities to search and manipulate bodies of text based on certain patterns. Many programming languages support regular expressions for string manipulation. For example, Perl has a powerful regular expression engine built directly into its syntax. The set of utilities (including the editor sed and the filter grep) provided by Unix distributions were the first to popularize the concept of regular expressions."

(The wiki page goes into a great deal of depth and is a pretty good read. If you're anything like me, you'll want to skip the Language Theory part and get right to the syntax section.)


One more thing to consider about regexps, is that they aren't well suited to large parsing tasks.  Since the grammar an infinite-lookahead parser, it spends a lot of time resolving negative matches.  Also, it's running off of the regular expression 'language' as it goes (okay, some regexp engines compile to an inermediate code first).   So you have a tool that is less efficent than a hand-coded solution for the same task.

All things said and done, I don't use regexps very often.  However, they come in *very handy* when I want a quick solution to a parsing problem, or simply don't mind trading runtime performance for sane-looking code.

- EricAnderton at yahoo

"pragma" <pragma_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:d15jro$4e1$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> The thumbnail sketch of a regexp is basically the world's most compact
> parser
> languge.  It makes relatively sizable parsing chores a breeze, by
> offloading all
> the messy details to a common syntax and a runtime engine to support it.

Oh, well then.  I suppose they might be useful when writing something like a source analyzer tool, or anything else that parses text.

> All things said and done, I don't use regexps very often.  However, they
> come in
> *very handy* when I want a quick solution to a parsing problem, or simply
> don't
> mind trading runtime performance for sane-looking code.

I can see what you mean.  I'm not sure why they'd need to be part of the language, as they are useful, but not _that_ integral.