wyantb/js-regex

A chainable API for constructing RegExps, written in Javascript

js-regex's Issues

Support for modifiers

Sometimes you want only part of your expression to be case insensitive. Enter modifiers: http://www.regular-expressions.info/modifiers.html

any() treats '-' as a plain literal

e.g. .any('a-c') should produce [a\-c], not [a-c]. It should match any of a, -, or c, whereas it currently matches a, b, and c.

Support Backreferences

In pure regexp terms, this means \n, where n is a positive integer.

In js-regex terms, this means being able to track .capture(name) groups properly, and adding a .repeatCapture(name) (or something similar) for repeating the results matched by a prior capture group.

Support Hex Digits, Control Characters

In pure regex terms, this means \xNN, \uNNNN, and \cK; see MDN for more information.

Inheritance structure allows for invalid operations

Example: .any().literals('abc').capture().end() - those parens won't do anyone good if they're found in a character set.

e36ccf7 is a trivial reproduction of the problem, but there's bound to be a lot more - can endSeq be called on a macro, what methods can be called from root nodes, etc.

Unicode support, astral symbols, etc

Like https://github.com/thebinarysearchtree/regexpbuilderjs/issues/11 and I'm sure there's plenty of other good references.
craniumslows/Countable@47f0b88 looked interesting too.

'Alt' syntax isn't consistently supported

What if I want to .sequence('hello!', regex.optional(' ')), or the like?

(This might be more an argument that I should dive through other regex builder libraries for their API - on second readthrough of the code, it looks like the only fns that don't support the alt form are the ones that act on previous terms, which makes sense)