Regularity is a friendly regular expression builder for Ruby. Regular expressions are a powerful way of pattern-matching against text, but too often they are 'write once, read never'. After all, who wants to try and deciper
/^[0-9]{3}-[A-Za-z]{2}#?[a|b]a{2,4}\$$/when you could express it as:
Regularity.new
.start_with(3, :digits)
.then('-')
.then(2, :letters)
.maybe('#')
.one_of(['a','b'])
.between([2,4], 'a')
.end_with('$')While taking up a bit more space, Regularity expressions are much more readable than their cryptic counterparts.
gem install regularity
Regularity objects are just plain ol Ruby objects that act like regexes - method_missing delegates to a regex object,
so you can go ahead and call =~ and match and all your other favorite methods
on them and it will just work TM
Most methods accept the same pattern signature - you can either specify a patterned constraint such as then("xyz"),
or a numbered constraint such as then(2, :digits). The following special identifers are supported:
:digit => '[0-9]'
:lowercase => '[a-z]'
:uppercase => '[A-Z]'
:letter => '[A-Za-z]'
:alphanumeric => '[A-Za-z0-9]'
:whitespace => '\s'
:space => ' '
:tab => '\t'
```
It doesn't matter if the identifier is pluralized, i.e. `then(2, :letters)` works in addition to `then(1, :letter)`
The following methods are supported:
`start_with(pattern)`: The line must start with the specified pattern
`append(pattern)`: Append a pattern to the end (Also aliased to `then`)
`end_with(pattern)`: The line must end with the specified pattern
`maybe(pattern)`: Zero or one of the specified pattern
`one_of(values)`: Specify an alternation, e.g. `one_of(['a', 'b', 'c'])`
`between(range, pattern)`: Specify a bounded repetition, e.g. `between([2,4], :digits)`
`zero_or_more(pattern)`: Specify that the pattern or identifer should appear zero or many times
`one_or_more(pattern)`: Specify that the pattern or identifer should appear one or many times
The DSL methods are chainable, meaning they return `self`. You can also call `regex` on a Regularity object to
return a RegExp object created from the specified pattern.
### Status
[](https://travis-ci.org/andrewberls/regularity)