You might be interested in “Eggex”, which aims to be a human-readable language that generates regexes. It’s currently written as a feature of the Oil shell, but

You might be interested in “Eggex”, which aims to be a human-readable language that generates regexes. It’s currently written as a feature of the Oil shell, but in theory any tool could support them. Eggex docs: https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/eggex.html https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/eggex.html. Recent blog post about their development: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/12/22.html https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/12/22.html. However, Eggexes are a thin, mostly-syntactic layer over regexes. You still have to understand the regex engine to use them. If this sounds useless to you because you don’t currently understand any flavor of regex or parsing, I encourage you not to give up on learning regexes. (https://www.regular-expressions.info/ https://www.regular-expressions.info/ was how I learned; it’s a great tutorial.) Text-parsing engines, including regex engines, are a powerful concept that can be used in many situations, and I think it’s worth spending the effort learning them until, to paraphrase another commenter, regexes become the human-readable language you were searching for. Or Eggexes, at least.