When you start learning a new programming language, maybe you had been learning follow those steps: variable, assignment, string, operators... On...
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That seems like a pretty interesting tool!
In the past, when I've run into issues with my regex I usually seek out a regex tester like regex101, but it looks like this might be a more helpful alternative.
I would probably still use regex101 at least occasionally. Regex is something that's interesting for me to learn whenever I have the opportunity.
oh I love regex101.com/ (I also use extendsclass.com/regex-tester.html)
I don't hate the idea of these, but I do find them awkward.
When I read
anythingBut(' ')I wonder, does it mean[^ ]or[^ ]+or[^ ]*? How do I tell it that I mean any whitespace, like\sinstead of a space? How is it clear thatmaybe(' ')andmaybe(' ')are different1 and mean spaces and tabs respectively?Back references? Discarded groups? All that shenanigans? I think I'd spend longer looking up how to do something with this sort of wrapper than I would just using regex in the first place. You can split regex over lines and add comments for them, so there shouldn't be any ambiguity. You can test them just like you test anything else.
To me, verbal expressions seem like a cut-down wrapper rather than an abstraction, and I'm not sure how they would help in anything but the simplest cases.
Pretend there's a tab in that, I can't put one in markdown :) ↩
I like this tool.
But I think I would rather use it as a helper to learn the regex, not the replacement. Especially at the beginning when you can start writing expression with VerbalExpressions and see the result in regex after that :)
First of all, when I saw the title I was hoping for a reference to bobince's epic html regex parse answer - was not disappointed :)
But more importantly, I think this a great solution for 90% of regex use-cases. In my experience most of these time you have simple patterns like yours where you don't need the full power of regex but there isn't a better alternative in the language. So your end up with PRs where a single character typo will result in an error can easily end up in prod.
Personally I have always found regex to be a write-only language and this is unlikely to change as I only use them once in a blue moon.
So this is a great post as I had not come across verbal expressions before. They look really useful and another tool I can use to make my code easier to understand. Must have a play next time i reach for a regex.
This is really neat! One place I would really like to see this is with regular expression libraries that don't support extended mode like Perl's regular expressions do - in particular, I'd like to see a Vimscript implementation. One, because of that lack of extended mode support, and two, because Vim's pattern language is pretty different from POSIX/Perl's regular expression language. I dream of the day where I can rewrite this:
...into something immediately understandable.
Really like this post. I’m a student and I’ve talked to quite a few others who work through some Regexp exercises and then hope they won’t have to use it ever again. I could see this as a nice tool for getting people comfortable with the logic behind regular expressions.
Thanks for posting a great tool,it brings too much convenience to my life but why do you say so :"the transition from Regex to VerbalExpressions is great as the movement from SQL to ORM."
I am thinking the regex can be applied for the SQL as well
Using ORM instead of SQL is more easier; It like writing VerbalExpressions instead of Regex.
Overall, I only mentioned about the convenience :)
While this seems a very nice readable library, I doubt the usability. It requires the user to know beforehand what functions she can use (maybe(), anythingBut() ...) If the user already knows what she can do, it's not too hard to do the same in regex.
You're right, but it's only take around some minutes for reading the API and in my case it is easier than reading Regex documentation.
And one more advantages of VerbalExpressions is making the code more readable.
I tried to learn but still have to look at the documentation after some months ;(
Thank you, free spacing mode mades it more readable. I will try it next time.
I'm very comfortable with Regex and love it, but I still think this lib is brilliant! What prompted you to start this project? When was it first released?
I have a project on my list to work on where I give it a set of strings and it generates the regular expression automatically.
I think a cool feature for this library would be to be able to reuse a set of existing expressions that others write.
Good work!
Oh I am not behind the project; you can find the detail of VerbalExpressions at github.com/VerbalExpressions
I only developed the online tool verbalregex.com which wrapped JSVerbalExpressions for easy writing and testing the VerbalExpressions.
Anyways, can you share some ideas about the algorithm for generating regex from a set of strings??? It sounds like the appliance of some Machine Learning algorithms.
If you don't know how to use regular expressions, then just don't use them. Ask someone to help you. Libs like this one help understand how do the regexps work, but for production use - use "regular" regular expressions. They perform better (real, effective code is faster than created with vreg), and more people know regexp than this. If have to - perhaps extract regexps to separate file and apply proper dovumentation. You can use multiline regexps and add comments, you know? And load them from separate file, with all support your IDE can provide. Check the freespacing mode, Michael Kohl mentioned.
Very nice tool, thanks for sharing
Great post!
Thank you :)
Hope it can solve your problems sometimes.
thanks for sharing!! this will help me one day.
If you want to learn real Regex with fun, try this:
regexcrossword.com/
Thank you, what an interesting game :)
Neat!
Nice!
See also: dev.to/rapidnerd/the-beauty-of-ver...
I've used verbal expressions a bit before and didn't find it to be that useful, it doesn't make regex that much easier to read and it's just another dependency on your project.
... is COBOL a true programming language? disclaimer: I've used it for more than 40 years, but I think that it's the worst language in the computer world!
Awesome post man, I'm excited to use that in my personal projects. I'm the office I'll try to use the verbalregex.com yet.
Yeah, I think you can use the native library of Verbal Expressions at your personal projects. Try out this link
verbalexpressions.github.io/
Nice!