Extending regexps to other kinds of sequences

[Edi Weitz]

I'm pretty sure that someone already did this, i.e. they forked
CL-PPCRE for arbitrary sequences.  But I can't remember the details
right now.  You'll probably find a link hidden in the mailing list
archives.

Cheers,
Edi.



On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 1:15 AM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
> The theory of regular expressions can be applied to any kind of sequence, not just strings.  This would be potentially useful for pattern-matching applications, where current approaches make it very cumbersome to say things like, "Match a list containing between three and five integers".  This sort of thing is easy to express in CL-PPCRE tree-like notation as, e.g. (:repetition (:type integer) 3 5)
>
> My question is: how hard would be it be to adapt the CL-PPCRE code to handle things like this?  Is there a sequence-type-agnostic core in CL-PPCRE that could be easily re-used for this purpose, or is the assumption that regexps only apply to strings woven deeply into the code?
>
> Thanks,
> rg
>