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> how great it would be to have a solid NaturalLanguage -> Regex translator This idea sounds good, but as soon as you start getting slightly more complicated y

> how great it would be to have a solid NaturalLanguage -> Regex translator This idea sounds good, but as soon as you start getting slightly more complicated you'll be writing paragraphs: Try writing this in a natural language format: <a\s+(?:[^>]*?\s+)?href="([^"]*)" That's a regex to get the value of an href from anchor links. "match "<a " then do not match a ">" if it exists, followed by a space, if it exists, then match a "href=", then begin a capturing group, then match anything but a '"' 0 or more times, then close a capturing group, then match a '"' I'm sure that's not even correct but you can see what I mean. I can see this idea being a good tool for learning though, especially for smaller regex

hamandcheese 10y ago
It's not wise to attempt to parse html with a regex :) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
modeless 10y ago
> Try writing this in a natural language format: > [...] That's a regex to get the value of an href from anchor links. A true natural language to regex system would take your short natural language description as input, not paragraphs describing the task in more detail. Of course this would require a lot of domain knowledge about HTML, but that knowledge is readily available out there on the internet. I think it's no longer crazy to imagine a system which could read the internet, learn about HTML, and apply that knowledge to answer your natural language regex query. This is clearly far beyond where we are today, but I think a few orders of magnitude larger neural nets would be able to handle this task, and the hardware guys are hard at work getting us there. The pace of improvement will be much faster than Moore's law over the next couple of years as the first optimized neural net hardware becomes available.

hamandcheese 10y ago

It's not wise to attempt to parse html with a regex :) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...

modeless 10y ago

> Try writing this in a natural language format: > [...] That's a regex to get the value of an href from anchor links. A true natural language to regex system would take your short natural language description as input, not paragraphs describing the task in more detail. Of course this would require a lot of domain knowledge about HTML, but that knowledge is readily available out there on the internet. I think it's no longer crazy to imagine a system which could read the internet, learn about HTML, and apply that knowledge to answer your natural language regex query. This is clearly far beyond where we are today, but I think a few orders of magnitude larger neural nets would be able to handle this task, and the hardware guys are hard at work getting us there. The pace of improvement will be much faster than Moore's law over the next couple of years as the first optimized neural net hardware becomes available.