Irregular

Regular expressions are very powerful, but they can get large and archaic quickly. Irregular provides tools that work together to help you abstract your regular expressions into human-readable code.

Irregular-rb comes with:

• A templating language for Regular Expressions that helps you abstract each chunk into a human-readable string

irregular-rb is based on irregular-js.

Usage Example

class CatRegexp
  include Irregular

  def cat_names
    names = ['betty', 'joyce', 'franklin', 'peter']
    "(#{names.join '|'})"
  end
end

irregular = CatRegexp.new

# insert results of method calls using backticks
regexp = irregular.compile_regexp(/I love my cat `cat_names`!/i)
p regexp # => /I love my cat (betty|joyce|franklin|peter)!/i

# use your regexp as normal
regexp =~ "I love my cat Joyce!" # => 0

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'irregular'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install irregular

API

Irregular

A module that provides functionality for compiling Irregular Expressions. Does nothing on its own; include or extend it into your class/module.

Irregular.compile_regexp

compile_regexp(regexp, options = 0)
compile_regexp(string, options = 0)

Method that compiles an irregular expression into a Regexp. (returns Regexp)

Parameters

regexp

A regular expression to use the source pattern and options of for compilation.

string

A string to use as the source pattern for compilation.

options

A list or or-ed Regexp options to apply to the resulting Regexp.

If passed with a Regexp object, it will be or-ed against the Regexp's existing options.

Contributing

Pull requests, bug reports welcome.

This library tries to mirror compilation behavior of irregular-js as much as possible/needed- if you notice behavior you think might be a bug, test if it behaves the same in irregular-js first. If you still think it's a bug, the report should be filed against irregular-js, and then once it is resolved there, a bug report should be filed here.

Notes

This library doesn't implement irregular-js's named captures functionality because named captures are supported natively in Ruby (they aren't in ES5).

Running tests

Tests are written using Rspec. To run:

$ bundle install rspec spec

License

MIT