Skip to content

Alternative Regex Syntax

Peter Aronoff edited this page Feb 17, 2022 · 41 revisions

This page lists projects that provide an alternative to traditional regex syntax, e.g. POSIX [[:digit:]]+ or Perl \d+.

It's freely editable, so please add your projects here.

Related: Alternative Shells

Regex / Regular Language Projects

  • Oil's Egg Expressions
    • Translates to POSIX ERE for use with grep, awk, sed
    • Literal strings are quoted; operators are unquoted / unescaped
    • Reuse and composition of of patterns
  • Raku Grammars
    • Literal strings are quoted; operators are unquoted / unescaped
  • Verbal Expressions - A JavaScript library that helps to construct difficult regular expressions
  • kleenexp - modern regular expression syntax everywhere with a painless upgrade path
  • SRL - Simple Regex Language. Regular Expressions Made Simple (Hacker News Comments)
  • Super Expressive - A zero-dependency JavaScript library for building regular expressions in (almost) natural language (Hacker News Comments)
  • Melody - Melody is a language that compiles to regular expressions and aims to be more easily readable and maintainable

Lisp-Like Syntax

Parsing Libraries

PEG, etc.

Smaller/Simpler Pattern Matching

Lua's Patterns - Lua's pattern-matching is a (deliberate) subset of what POSIX regular expressions can do. As Roberto Ierusalimschy writes in Programming in Lua: "The main reason for this decision is size: a typical implementation of POSIX regular expressions takes more than 4000 lines of code, which is more than half the size of all Lua standard libraries together. In comparison, the implementation of pattern matching in Lua has less than 600 lines" (77, 4th edition).

Links

Clone this wiki locally