• d-bugmail puremagic.com (23/40) Jan 24 2013 http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9390
• d-bugmail puremagic.com (32/32) Jan 25 2013 http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9390

d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9390

           Summary: Option for verbose regular expressions
           Product: D
           Version: D2
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P2
         Component: Phobos
        AssignedTo: nobody puremagic.com
        ReportedBy: bearophile_hugs eml.cc



I'd really like an option to write "verbose" regular expressions in D, like in
Python:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html


 re.X
 re.VERBOSE
 
     This flag allows you to write regular expressions that look
     nicer. Whitespace within the pattern is ignored, except when in a
     character class or preceded by an unescaped backslash, and, when


     through the end of the line are ignored.
 
     That means that the two following regular expression objects that
     match a decimal number are functionally equal:
 



     b = re.compile(r"\d+\.\d*")


RE code is code like every other, so it enjoys comments, a nicer indenting and
formatting.

Making RE more readable helps their debug and understand. In my Python code all
RE longer than half a line of chars are "verbose".

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d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9390


Dmitry Olshansky <dmitry.olsh gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |dmitry.olsh gmail.com



12:13:45 PST ---
How about adding the common extensions that is called comments inside regular
expression.

I can't recall synatx off-hand but it's something like:



Plus you can already use any of the follwoing:

auto pattern - r"the first piece" // comment
r"the second piece" //comment 2
...
r" the last piece"; //last comment


Or if implicit concatenation feels too dirty:

auto pattern - r"the first piece"  // comment
~ r"the second piece" //comment 2
...
~ r" the last piece"; //last comment

Either way free-form regex + top-level explanatory note is enough by my
standards. The rationale is if you have to explan every piece in isolation then
it's one of 2 cases: you are explaning machanics to people that don't know what
regex is (and it's wrong) or the regex pattern is too darn complex for its own
good.

Since this is enhancement request I hereby propose 2 ways to solve it: close as
won't fix or add the aformentioned extension for comments (that at least is
more or less common). I'm not going to add another option that messes with
syntax rules.

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