Ruby (borrowed from Perl and common in many regex impls I believe) has the "x" modifier to ignore whitespace and comments in literal regexes, for example:

Ruby (borrowed from Perl and common in many regex impls I believe) has the "x" modifier to ignore whitespace and comments in literal regexes, for example: str = "2012-10-04T07:20:00" str =~ / (\d{4}) # four digit year - (\d{2}) # two digit month - (\d{2}) # two digit day T (\d{2}) # two digit hour : (\d{2}) # two digit min : (\d{2}) # two digit sec /x