Py Idiomatic Regex (AKA iregex)

Documentation Available Here

An easier way to write regex in Python using OOP instead of strings.

Makes the code much easier to read and understand while still using Regex under the hood.

Very easy to use, entirely contained within two files consts.py and regex.py.

Installation

Available on PyPi

pip install iregex

Examples

Imagine a regex to match variable names in most common languages.

They must start with an alphabetical character, then for the second character on they can contain numbers and underscores as well.

The regex for this would be:

[a-zA-Z][_\w]*

And in python you would compile this like so:

import re
re.compile(r"[a-zA-Z][_\w]*")

In this library the code would be:

from iregex import Regex, ALPHA, ALPHA_NUMERIC, AnyChar, ZeroOrMore
(ALPHA + ZeroOrMore(AnyChar("_", ALPHA_NUMERIC))).compile()

Note: If you would like to use the regex library instead of re do this instead.

import regex
from iregex import Regex, ALPHA, ALPHA_NUMERIC, AnyChar, ZeroOrMore
regex.compile(str(ALPHA + ZeroOrMore(AnyChar("_", ALPHA_NUMERIC))))

We do this to prevent the need for additional dependencies.

Just take a look at the documentation for the Regex class to get an idea of all the methods you can use!

You chain methods together for sequential operations and nest literals for nested operations.

PyParsing

A lot of people will ask why use this over PyParsing? I actually had never heard of pyparsing before writing this library and sense have made updates that are inspired by pyparsing. The main reason I might use this over pyparsing is to stay specifically inside the Regex space using either the builtin re or regex library which can sometimes be faster than pyparsing. This library operates almost entirely on strings, which is a lot simpler than what pyparsing is doing under the hood. But please, use both!

Contributions

Please make a contribution, this library is still growing!

Please download poetry and run poetry install to set up your build environment.

We use mypy (so be sure to type your code), flake8, and black so be sure to use pre-commit install before your first push to comply with git pre-commit standards. Otherwise your pull request will not make it past TravisCI.

Always pytest your code and make PR's with good code coverage.