Evimosaurus Rex

E-Rex

because everyone deserves extended regular expressions

A couple posts back I compared some idiomatic Ruby with equivalent Vim forms. One of those was the multiline, whitespace-insensitive extended regular expression mode that the /x flag gives the PCRE wielder. I showed how this might be achieved in Vim as:

let PHONE_NUMBER_PATTERN = substitute(substitute(' \ ^ \ \%( \ \(\d\) # prefix_digit \ [\ \-\.]\? # optional_separator \ \)\? \ \%( \ (\?\(\d\{3}\))\? # area_code \ [\ \-\.] # separator \ \)\? \ \(\d\{3}\) # trunk \ [\ \-\.] # separator \ \(\d\{4}\) # line \ \%(:\ \?x\? # optional_space_or_x \ \(\d\+\) # extension \ \)\? \ $', '# \S\+', '', 'g'), '\\\@<! ', '', 'g') echo string(PHONE_NUMBER_PATTERN) let a_phone_number = '1-234-567-0987:1234' echo matchlist(a_phone_number, PHONE_NUMBER_PATTERN)

Which is all good and well, but wouldn’t it be nicer if we could just do this instead:

let PHONE_NUMBER_PATTERN = ERex.parse(' \ ^ \ \%( \ \(\d\) # prefix_digit \ [\ \-\.]\? # optional_separator \ \)\? \ \%( \ (\?\(\d\{3}\))\? # area_code \ [\ \-\.] # separator \ \)\? \ \(\d\{3}\) # trunk \ [\ \-\.] # separator \ \(\d\{4}\) # line \ \%(:\ \?x\? # optional_space_or_x \ \(\d\+\) # extension \ \)\? \ $') echo string(PHONE_NUMBER_PATTERN) let a_phone_number = '1-234-567-0987:1234' echo matchlist(a_phone_number, PHONE_NUMBER_PATTERN)

Where the ERex object was just magically waiting in the background for all of our extended regex needs…?

Install https://github.com/Raimondi/VimRegStyle and you can!

“There is no charge for awesomeness.”

— Po

This just in! the awesomeness of Extended Regular Expressions has just been added to vimple.