RegexBuilder

Regular expressions, while extremely powerful, are often cryptic and difficult to read, as we can see from the examples we’ve looked at so far in this chapter. They can be especially hard for those new to regular expressions or not very familiar with their syntax. RegexBuilder addresses this by allowing us to construct regular expressions using a domain-specific language, making them easier to read and more maintainable.

RegexBuilder has several elements, defined in the RegexBuilder module. Some of the more popular ones are:

• Capture: Captures a group of characters
• ZeroOrMore: Matches zero or more occurrences of the preceding element
• OneOrMore: Matches one or more occurrences of the preceding element
• Optional: Matches the preceding element zero or one time
• Sequence: Matches a sequence of elements
• Alternation: Matches one of the provided alternatives
• .word: Matches a word character
• .whitespace: Matches a whitespace character

Let’s see how RegexBuilder works...