Common Regular Expressions Made Simple

https://github.com/madisonmay/CommonRegex

by madisonmay • 13 years ago

26 24 13 years ago

github.com

JazCE• 13 years ago

I'm gonna be That Guy and say that the e-mail regex isn't upto scratch and probably should not be included.

generally, very good.

abolibibelot2• 13 years ago

I'm gonna be That Other Guy and say that the date and phone regex are respectively english-language and US specific. So it's common for a narrow definition of common.

zoj_bad• 13 years ago

I'm gonna be That Other Other Guy and say....stuff like this is the reason why most programmers I meet take ages to do anything custom. Evey body uses this framework and that library and make bulky code that could actually be implemented with 2 far more efficient lines and will struggle when the need to customize presents itself. Learn Regex...you will have a crazy powerful weapon in your arsenal.

phorese2• 13 years ago

The time regex is, too. In German you can expect to encounter the text fragment

um 6:00 am 05.12. (at 6:00 on 12/05/..)

If i read it correctly, the time regex would extract "6:00 am" as time, but the "am" is wrong (German uses 24h format).

masklinn3• 13 years ago

Yep. This library is the very application and example of H. L. Mencken's:

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

often paraphrased as "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

JadeNB2• 13 years ago

The author does explicitly note that in the readme:

Please note that this module is currently English/US specific.

jrabone2• 13 years ago

Previous discussion & article about why you just shouldn't bother with email regexes at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5763327

csmuk• 13 years ago

I'm the guy who says "poke the SMTP server" rather than validate the email address.

masklinn3• 13 years ago

Doesn't really apply here, the goal is to detect the existence of a (potential) email address in the text, you can poke the SMTP server once you've found something address-looking to ensure that it's an address and not, say, a twitter thing.

camus2• 13 years ago

Isnt there an i18n extension built on lib ICU in python , like Intl extension in PHP ?

http://site.icu-project.org/

I'm sure there are better alternatives than just regexp to validate numbers, emails ,etc ...

ygra• 13 years ago

It's not validation in this case, it's finding them in a body of text. For validation you generally have it easier because you often only deal with a single datum in a field (and thus string).

masklinn3• 13 years ago

The CLDR provides locale-specific formats for some datum types (IIRC numbers, dates, and durations). These formats can probably be reversed into the corresponding regular expression in order to perform locale-aware data detection.

Of course further complexity is added in people being able to provide partial and context-dependent information, which is much harder to detect e.g. "December 3rd"

brudgers• 13 years ago

I am reminded of VerbalExpressions https://github.com/VerbalExpressions which hit HN in early August. Interested in learning more about regex's I did some work on a Racket port.

That project shows there are two tracks by which to tackle the problem that regex syntax is incoherent gobbledygook. The first is creating a regex version of pho with 5000 functions and mix and match names piece by piece. The second is to rename regex symbols to something that is easier for humans to parse.

yconst• 13 years ago

Very good point! It's not the reasoning and logic behind regex that would turn a beginner away from it, its the syntax that is being used that often results into expressions turning into impenetrable goo!

(thanks for the verbal expressions link btw, seems really promising)

JadeNB2• 13 years ago

Unless I'm not understanding my way around the project, this seems to be a very small library of regular expressions. As one would expect, Perl's offerings blow anything else out of the water: http://search.cpan.org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2013031301/lib....

Common Regular Expressions Made Simple

Related Stories