lwv27@CAS.BITNET (08/26/90)
First, before I start, does anyone know of a document available out there
which attempts to provide a centralized tutoral on the concept of regular
expressions? I would love to find a document to have on hand which
would be a REFERENCE document, but would contain a combination of the
types of regular expressions from ed, ex/vi, grep, egrep, sed, BSD and
System V and Posix, tr, bourne sh, csh, ksh, and any other common Unix
use (perl, awk, yacc, lex, other?).
Next, of course, what I would love to have is a single set of regular
expression routines which would be able to handle all of the FUNCTIONALITY
of the above conglomeration. Not that the SYNTAX would necessarily be
the same, as there are sometimes variences and probably even conflicts.
The primary example that I have in mind is that the public domain version
of regexp from Henry Spencer does not handle RE{m,n} syntax. It also
does not handle word delimiters, and probably a few others.
Does anyone have any pointers to a higher set of functional routines than
those mentioned? I do not really want to have to do all sorts of data
transformations into various syntaxes to parse various types of
contructs. But doing without those replicators does make life tough.
Another construct that I really would like to have is numbered matches
on the SOURCE side of the string - i.e.
([a-z]{3,4}[0-9]{2})([.,'])([A-Z])\2\1
would be mean that a string like abc12,A.xyz99
would be matched (the first 3 reg expresions are obvious, the last two
REs repeat the second and then the first expression).
--
Larry W. Virden
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