6 ms·

Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as string

• ilkkao 9y ago
  Javascript is like Perl: /foo/i.test('foobar') is valid JS.
• cutler 9y ago
  Ruby is a direct descendant of Perl and borrows its regex syntax.
  • MadcapJake 9y ago
    Ruby used Oniguruma (and now Onigmo) for RegEx https://github.com/k-takata/Onigmo https://github.com/k-takata/Onigmo
    • cutler 9y ago
      As far as I can make out these regex engines are very close to Perl5.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      Yes (well, for MRI at least; I'm not sure other implemebtations use the same regex engine) and it used a different regex engine before Oniguruma. But engines and syntax are unrelated; Ruby has a dedicated regex literal syntax which was directly inspired by Perl.
• Ardren 9y ago
  Javascript has regex literals /foo\sbar/i; Is the same as: new RegExp('foo\\sbar', 'i');
  • hoytech 9y ago
    One thing that annoys me a bit about the JS syntax though: As far as I know, JS regexp literals don't have custom delimiter support. For instance in perl you can do this: $str =~ m{/some/path/\w+} But in JS you need to escape the / characters, or use a normal string as an argument to Regexp, in which case you need to escape the backslashes: /\/some\/path\/\w+/ Regexp("/some/path/\\w+")
• cesarb 9y ago
  Some other languages have a "raw string" syntax which disables backslash processing. For instance, Python (see https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html and https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-and-bytes-literals https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#st...) and Rust (see https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/tokens.html#raw-string-literals https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/tokens.html#raw-string-l...).
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. So, you've never seen Ruby?
  • rcthompson 9y ago
    I've done a very small about of ruby programming which did not involve regular expressions.