[swift-evolution] Empower String type with regular expression

[davesweeris at mac.com]

Yeah… that verbal expressions thing looks really cool, but it’s not a substitute for the “real thing”. If we put the testing bit in a protocol, anything that validates text could conform to it and automatically be usable with switches and such:
protocol RegExValidator {
    func validateRegEx(_: String) -> Bool
}
func ~= (lhs: String, rhs: RegExValidator) -> Bool {
    return rhs.validateRegEx(lhs)
}
func ~= (lhs: RegExValidator, rhs: String) -> Bool {
    return lhs.validateRegEx(rhs)
}

- Dave Sweeris

> On Feb 1, 2016, at 02:02, Haravikk via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 1 Feb 2016, at 03:48, John Randolph via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> Perl 6’s regex implementation looks like a  logical progression of the grep style as we’ve come to know it over the years, but I’d really like to see Swift go with something like the Verbal Expressions approach.
>> 
>> https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/SwiftVerbalExpressions <https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/SwiftVerbalExpressions>
>> 
>> All the power is there, but it’s far more readable.
> 
> I like the verbal expressions syntax, could we do both? i.e- instead of mapping straight onto NSRegularExpression, could we have a Swift RegularExpression struct that can either take a traditional regular expression, or be constructed via verbal expressions? It might be mapped onto NSRegularExpression behind the scenes, but could let us use both forms easily.
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