Extremely verbose is right. Here's one such approach in java that I found last year - https://github.com/sgreben/regex-builder https://github.com/sgreben/regex

Extremely verbose is right. Here's one such approach in java that I found last year - https://github.com/sgreben/regex-builder https://github.com/sgreben/regex-builder. Yeah, regex can be a bit clunky at times and has a steeper learning curve, but they're pretty industry standard at this point, and portable across languages with a few caveats.