Polyglot::Regexen

A module to enable use of non-Raku flavors of regex directly in Raku code.

Why?

Because copy and paste. Also, there are lots of little gotchas when going between different flavors. What counts for \s, \d, ., or even $ can vary substantially or in quite subtle ways. If you have a battle-tested regex, don't worry about rewriting it. Just use it as is!

The goal of this module is to provide a variety of ways for you to use your favor flavors in Raku scripts — even in grammars!When using regexen from this module, you can be assured that capture ordering is preserved, the meaning of whitespace won't get changed, etc.

Support

The support for different flavors is shown below in a table, followed by a discussion on any (hopefully temporary) deviations from the standard. The meaning of the columns is the following:

• In grammars: these can be used inside of grammars. Just declare the regex with the prefix. Since } will necessarily be the terminating character, you may need to escape it in some way.

• Bare quoted: just as you can use m/foo/ for regular regexes, these allow you to prefix with, e.g., ecma-m/foo/

• Lexical scope: these are defined by my/our scoping, e.g. my ecma-regex { … }

(At the moment, only Javascript is supported. The others are aspirational.)

Support Caveats

• ECMA-262 (Javascript)

  • Not all options are currently available (right now, just s, m, and i).

  • In block form (defined with ecma-regex { … }, leading and trailing white space is ignored).

  • To add options in block form, use a colon: ecma-regex:im { … }

  • Named references (via \\k) not yet supported

  • Unicode option is effectively always on. More testing will be required to tease out if/when that makes a difference

Version History

• **v0.0.1

  • Initial public release with most of ECMA262 (JavaScript) regex supported