Open Radar

 
Summary:

Any modern language should natively support regular expression literals without resorting to constructing a class and interpolating a pattern into a string.  Of course a class equivalent would be driving the functionality and be helpful for more dynamic construction of patterns.  Regex literals can really clean up code and make it more readable.

There is not a single mention of Regular Expressions in the Swift book and while I know we still have NSRegularExpression, it is cumbersome to use.

Proposal:

A regular expression literal might look like the following:

let pattern = /[Cc]ats?/

A simple way of detecting a match:

if pattern.isMatch(text) {
    …
}

It would be great if this could be simplified to a special operator, such as =~ in Ruby.

Also enumerate over matches:

for match in pattern.matches(text) {
   println(“Found \(match.value) at character position: \(match.position)”)
}

Support for named groups:

let naiveEmailPattern = /(<?username>[A-Za-z-_0-9])@(<?company>[A-Za-z0-9_-]).corp/
for match in naiveEmailPattern.matches(text) {
	let username = match[“username”]
        let company = match[“company”]
        let email = match.value
        println(“The user \(username) works at \(company) and has an email address of \(email)”)
}