JSVerbalExpressions

I looked at the VerbalExpressionJS[1] example and it looks like combining parsers to me. If you need to make regex more verbose, better use parser combinator library when available. RegEx benefits compared to parser combinators other than compactness aren't obvious to me. [1]: <https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions/tre...>

I agree with you. I got tired of fighting with regex where I got to the point of simply not using it if at all possible. A comment further up offered a very promising alternative. https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions#tes... It's a bit verbose, but I don't care anymore, I am too much a veteran to care about my code being sleek, I want it readable and workable.

For spec review from business partners I have found "verbal expressions" the most useful flavor. Specifically because to review them you don't need to know regular expressions and the library has ports for most programming languages. Example: https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions#tes...

There's also VerbalExpressions library that's been ported to 30+ languages: https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions

> For example https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions is a library that lets developers express regexps using a fluent API. Except from what I can see, it only supports trivial cases. What's a syntax that supports grouping, alternation, a numerical range of number of matches (e.g. \d{3,10}), and the combining of any number of those those? I suspect it quickly devolves to the case where you either use the extended syntax and comments are really what matters, or the terseness is useful in at least not making it so verbose and meandering that it's hard to comprehend just because the amount of boilerplate to usefully express something dwarfs the functional bits. Regular expressions work best when matching a a character level. The non-terse mode of stuff you are grasping at works best when matching at a symbolic level, and

The biggest point of complexity, IMO, is the representation in which the characters to be matched are mixed in with the syntactical elements in a single string. This tends to cause confusion, makes escaping complex, and is just really different from most other ways of expressing logic in programming. Even advanced regex features like extended mode and named captures, which I love, don't get around this fundamental issue with the representation. It does have advantages though, a big one being terseness, and the ability to be expressed in an implementation-independent way. Another is that for some types of regexes, the expression "sort of looks like" the strings it can match against, which can help intuition. I think the way forward is to consider the existing syntax a "terse mode" and to use regex builder libraries [0] as a "verbose mode."

Here's a somewhat related project that aims to make regular expressions more verbose: https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions Here's a simple example for matching URLs: const tester = VerEx() .startOfLine() .then('http') .maybe('s') .then('://') .maybe('www.') .anythingBut(' ') .endOfLine(); The project has been ported to many different languages and it outputs a normal regular expression that you can use to match your text.

Reminds me of the 'verbal expressions' projects from years back: https://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/08/26/verbal-expression/ https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions https://medium.com/@leighsn/verbal-expressions-in-ruby-fb8a9...

There's this[1] effort for a more readable syntax[2][3]. [1] https://verbalexpressions.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions [3] https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PythonVerbalExpressions

Interesting, thanks for mentioning! Looks similar to VerbalExpressions (https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions/wik...)

They're notoriously difficult to understand, and there have been lots of attempts to support alternatives that are more human readable (these examples include alternatives and Regex wrappers): * https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions * https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse * https://drup.github.io/2016/08/12/tyre/