From: Albert Schlef <albertschlef@...>
Date: 2009-12-24T11:27:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Alternate Regular Expressions?

Ari Brown wrote:
> Just randomly curious -
> 
> Is there an alternate RegExp "language" to the current one in Ruby
> and Perl?
> 

There's a RegExp library for Common Lisp that, besides a string, accepts 
also a "parse tree". See http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/

The regexp string...

    (?:abc){3,5}

...is equal to the following data structure:

   (:GREEDY-REPETITION 3 5 (:GROUP "abc"))

which, in Ruby, looks like:

   [:GREEDY-REPETITION, 3, 5, [:GROUP "abc"]]

This is not really a different language, just a way to express the 
regexp string as a data-structure.
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