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Perl, Ruby and some other languages support a similar 'extended' RegEx syntax which allows comments and disregards whitespace (in Ruby, you use the 'x' flag on a Regexp literal).

For those using plain JavaScript -- or wanting to do a one-off conversion -- I wrote a simple JS function that converts an extended RegEx to a plain one:

http://blog.mackerron.com/2010/08/08/extended-multi-line-js-...

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Yeah, my guess is that CoffeeScript took direction from those languages for this feature.

Nice function to convert annotated string to a regex. I wonder if this is being considered in the next versions of JavaScript? Or better yet... native annotation?

I like the CoffeeScript approach since that logic is done at compile time and not when it is being executed.

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