Regex Generator Idea

[TonyValenti]

@stephentoub I had an idea this morning that I wanted to pass your way. Maybe it is irrelevant but I wanted to at least toss it in the bucket for consideration.

I seem to recall you mentioning once that regexs like ab and (a)(b) are technically different regexes because of how grouping will be handled between them.

When I use regexes, I use parens so that I am very clear about how I'm capturing things, but I never index into the groups of a captured regex using their numeric index. I either want the whole value of text that the pattern matched or I want to extract explicit named captures. I speculate that other developers use regexes in a similar way as well.

If ab is more optimizable than (a)(b), it would be great to have a flag like IgnorePatternGroups (similar to IgnorePatternWhitespace) that can be used to tell the regex engine that I don't care about how the groups are returned as long as my named captures still have their values.

[stephentoub]

That already exists:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.regularexpressions.regexoptions?view=net-6.0#system-text-regularexpressions-regexoptions-explicitcapture

[TonyValenti]

Oh wow! I didn't realize that!