A structural regular expression engine for Rust
8 days ago
- #rust
- #regular-expressions
- #text-processing
- Introduction to structural regular expressions, a concept introduced by Rob Pike in his Sam text editor.
- Comparison between traditional regular expressions and structural regular expressions, highlighting the latter's ability to compose smaller expressions for better text structure analysis.
- Example demonstrating the extraction of programmer names and their preferred programming languages from a structured text using structural regular expressions.
- Explanation of structural regular expression operators (x, y, g, v) and actions (a, i, c, p, d) with examples.
- Introduction of parallel groups in structural regular expressions for handling multiple conditions simultaneously.
- Presentation of structex, a Rust crate for implementing structural regular expressions, with examples of CLI tools built using it.
- Discussion on potential improvements and future directions for structural regular expressions, including performance optimizations and broader applications.