Rethinking regex
in Software engineering
What if regular expressions were easy to write?
While attending the Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2010, I attended a session about Arel and how Rails was changing their ORM layer to make it easier to incrementally build the query.
Old: Article.find(:all, :order => “published_at desc”, :limit => 10)
New: Article.order(“published_at desc”).limit(10)
It occurred to me that this concept of simplifying could be applied to regular expression.
While I have time, I’ll continue to build up examples of what the syntax could look like.
Random thoughts:
What: not a number
- ie a string that can’t be convert to a number
- A string that contains at least on character
- Regex: /^.\D+.$/
- Positive examples: 113t23io10908-113
- Negative examples: 13431
