VerbalExpressions – JavaScript library that helps construct regular expressions | Hacker News Reader

VerbalExpressions – JavaScript library that helps construct regular expressions

github.com

18 pointsshadeless9 comments

That's cute and on one hand I like the concept, but on the other hand I find that's exactly how normal terse regexs read to me anyway...

    ^https?://(?:www\.)?[^ ]*$

is way more succinct and just as easy to read as:

            .startOfLine()
            .then( "http" )
            .maybe( "s" )
            .then( "://" )
            .maybe( "www." )
            .anythingBut( " " )
            .endOfLine();

Well... assuming you know regular expressions. Which you should if you are a programmer.

i could see it useful if you had a situation where you need to programmatically generate a regex, but i don't really see myself using it much at all.

I kind of know regular expressions but every time I have to write one I head off to regexpal to write it. For instance, off the top of my head, I have no idea what the "?" in the parenthesis does. Usually expect a character to precede a "?", "." or "*".

I also don't use them often enough to commit all the rules to memory.

However, given VerbalExpressions, I don't think I'd have a problem building regular expressions. For a newbie, startOfLine and endOfLine is far more memorable than "^" and "$".

> Which you should if you are a programmer.

You can be pretty productive programmer without knowing regular expressions. Depends on the kind of programming you do really.

There are ten thousand things I "should" know as a programmer. And I use regular expressions about once per year, which is long enough for them to become unreadable between usages, and require me to spend a chunk of time looking up syntax for even the simplest of them.

I have always struggled writing a regular expressions. Even after being successful in writing one, I could not retain what it did once I returned to it. This library is definitely for people like me.

Damn, this is so simple yet so powerful I can't believe it's the first time anyone has thought about it.

> I can't believe it's the first time anyone has thought about it.

Implying this is?

Not implying that, but haven't seen something as similar and high-level before.

As a diabetic, I try and not over-dose on syntactic sugar...

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