[swift-evolution] [Swift4] Priorities and Sugar

[Charlie Monroe]

> Foundation already has NSRegularExpression. Do you mean that the
> stdlib could potentially duplicate Foundation functionality?

NSRegularExpression is not really easy to use for most common usecases (first match in string, etc.) + it lacks a lot of features e.g. Python has (named groups, etc.). I've personally never used NSRegularExpression and rather wrote an ObjC wrapper around re2 (https://github.com/google/re2/).

I'd really like Swift's regex to be much more powerful and be able to match against it in a switch:

switch someString {
case /\d+:
	...
case /w+:
	...
...

Also, you can have compile-time check whether the expression is valid if regex is part of the language. But that's kind of getting too specific and away from the original discussion.


> If so,
> what are the implications for Foundation (and
> swift-corelibs-foundation)? Does this also mean that other "stringy"
> functionality could arrive in the stdlib, for example a Swifty JSON
> serializer/deserializer?
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> -- 
> Ian Partridge
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