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Yea, I know what you are going to say. “I can do that with ___” Fill in the blank
with grep, awk, sed, perl, etc. But honestly, none of these tools are
Language 2.0 (read “post-Ruby”). What I want is a simaple commandline tool that
given me quick access to a Regular Expression engine. No more, no less.

Now I could have written this too in Perl. I’m sure it would just as good, if not
better since Perl’s Regualar Expression engine rocks, or so I hear. But Ruby’s is
pretty good too, and getting better (with 1.9+). And since I know Ruby very
well. Well that’s waht you get.

USAGE

Okay, check it out. It’s real simple. Supply a regular expression and a file to
match upon to the regex command.

  $ regex '=begin.*?\n(.*)\n=end' sample.rb

It does exactly what you would expect — returns the content between the first
=begin…=end clause it comes across. To see all such comments, you can use
the repeat options.

  $ regex --repeat '=begin.*?\n(.*)\n=end' sample.rb

By default regex produces string output. Regular expression groups are delimited
by ASCII 29 (035 1D) END OF GROUP, and repeat matches are delimited by
ASCII character 30 (036 1E) END OF RECORD.

  $ regex '=begin.*?\n(.*)\n=end' sample.rb

It does exactly what you would expect — returns the content between the first
=begin…=end clause it comes across. To see all such comments, you can use
the repeat options.

  $ regex --repeat '=begin.*?\n(.*)\n=end' sample.rb

By default regex produces string output. Regular expression groups are delimited
by ASCII 29 (035 1D) END OF GROUP, and repeat matches are delimited by
ASCII character 30 (036 1E) END OF RECORD.

Instead of string output, regex also support YAML and JSON output.

  $ regex --yaml --repeat '=begin.*?\n(.*)\n=end' sample.rb

In this case the returned matches are delimited using an Array of Arrays.

Check out the —help and I am sure the rest will come to you real quick.
But it you want more information, then do us the good favor of jumping over
to the wiki[http://proutils.github.com/regex].

STATUS

This is a very early release. So don’t expect every feature under the sun just yet,
or that every detail is going to work peachy keen. But hey, if something needs fixing
or a feature needs adding, well then get in there and send me a patch. Open
source software is built on TEAM WORK, baby.

And expect a potential for rapid change here at the beginning.