DRDrup·Aug 15, 2016
Hi, author here!
I didn't invented the combinators for regex, that was already in ocaml-re (which is used as backend for tyre). The combinator approach has many advantages:
- You don't need to remember which regex syntax the library is using. Is it using the emacs one ? The perl one ? The javascript one ? The bash one ?! (shudder) ...
- It's "self documenting". Your combinators are just functions, so you just expose them and give them type signatures, and the usual documentation/autocompletion/whatevertooling works.
- It composes better. You don't have to mash string together to compose your regex, you can name intermediary regexs with normal variables, etc.
- Related to the point above: No string quoting hell.
Now, tyre doesn't really improve any of that. If anything, combinators are simpler in ocaml-re[1]. What tyre gives you is the au
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tomatic extraction and casting of matching groups into the desired datatype (and the reverse direction, but that's almost free bonus). No need to select groups manually and transform into an integer, no need to reconstruct tuples/lists/records, tyre will do that for you (and handle conversion failures cleanly).
[1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-re/blob/master/lib/re.mli#L20...