3 ms·

Perl's regex handling. That's the one I miss in whatever other language I program in. To be able to match AND get the matched substrings out in one line, makes

• riffraff 3y ago
  isn't that the same in any expression-oriented language ? E.g. in ruby this could be puts $1 if /(\d+)/ =~ 'test 123' # perl-like if m = /(\d+)/.match('test 123') then puts m[1] end # perl-less Perl's regexes do more things perhaps, but this is a relatively common thing, I believe.
  • shakow 3y ago
    Ruby is a very concise language. Matching & getting in most languages typically devolves into matching a regexp to a string, getting a MatchResult object, and then getting/iterating/checking/... on it.
  • marai2 3y ago
    ($hour, $min, $sec) = $someTimeString =~ /(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)/; if ($hour >= 12) { if ($min == 42) { doSomething(); } } Whereas in Python, Ruby even though it's only a tiny extra step, but that symantic distance in one's head when parsing out and naming the parts of a regex on the same is a convenience that when you get used to it, you really miss it. m = /(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)/.match( someTimeString ) hour = m[0] min = m[1] sec = m[2] if hour >= ...
    • riffraff 3y ago
      but ruby, python etc.. can just extract the list too, it's just an extra method call on the same object (perhaps there could be destructuring too in modern ruby/python) hour, min, sec = /(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)/.match('10:11:12').captures or hour, min, sec = re.compile(r'(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)').match('10:11:12').groups() ruby & python will explode if there is no match rather than fail silently but I'm not convinced the difference is huge.
• collyw 3y ago
  Indeed. I always need to look up the docs when I use Python regex, while in Perl it's so much more natural.