4 ms·

Real regex would be nice. I understand not going full beans with the batteries, but surely a few more wouldn't go amiss? Perhaps a 'battery' for formatting a

Real regex would be nice. I understand not going full beans with the batteries, but surely a few more wouldn't go amiss? Perhaps a 'battery' for formatting a Lua table as a string, since tables are such a big deal in Lua? This would help immensely when debugging scripts during development.

ziml77 6y ago
A built-in function to convert a table to a string would be great. It's not hard to write one myself but tables are so core to the language and printing them is handy for debugging and exploration.
ufo 6y ago
For more complex string matching tasks that the built-in patterns cannot handle, LPeg might be a good choice. I think it's not likely that something like PCRE-compatible regular expressions would be included in the Lua standard library because PCRE is fairly large, by Lua standards. By the way, for formatting Lua tables for debugging I like using "inspect". (It's not part of the standard library but oh well, that's the whole topic of today's discussion). http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua
- stretchcat 6y ago
  Sure PCRE support would be big, but even posix-style BRE would be a very welcome improvement I think. (As for formatting tables, presently most of my Lua code has been written for mpv which has a builtin utils.to_string(v) for this purpose. In the manpage, this is documented as "only needed because Lua is terrible." I think that's a bit too far, but the frustration this must have caused really comes across.)
  - pull_my_finger 6y ago
    > PCRE support would be big I have to say, once I learned to appreciate the combo of Lua's builtin pattern matching (no not _that_ kind of pattern matching) and LPEG, I really loathe having to use cryptic regexp's in languages like JS. Patterns are enough for most stuff, and when you want to get into more complex patterns, a PEG (LPEG in particular) is much more readable and expressive than a regex that would come out looking like a generated password.

ziml77 6y ago

A built-in function to convert a table to a string would be great. It's not hard to write one myself but tables are so core to the language and printing them is handy for debugging and exploration.

ufo 6y ago

For more complex string matching tasks that the built-in patterns cannot handle, LPeg might be a good choice. I think it's not likely that something like PCRE-compatible regular expressions would be included in the Lua standard library because PCRE is fairly large, by Lua standards. By the way, for formatting Lua tables for debugging I like using "inspect". (It's not part of the standard library but oh well, that's the whole topic of today's discussion). http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua

stretchcat 6y ago
Sure PCRE support would be big, but even posix-style BRE would be a very welcome improvement I think. (As for formatting tables, presently most of my Lua code has been written for mpv which has a builtin utils.to_string(v) for this purpose. In the manpage, this is documented as "only needed because Lua is terrible." I think that's a bit too far, but the frustration this must have caused really comes across.)
- pull_my_finger 6y ago
  > PCRE support would be big I have to say, once I learned to appreciate the combo of Lua's builtin pattern matching (no not _that_ kind of pattern matching) and LPEG, I really loathe having to use cryptic regexp's in languages like JS. Patterns are enough for most stuff, and when you want to get into more complex patterns, a PEG (LPEG in particular) is much more readable and expressive than a regex that would come out looking like a generated password.