Awesome
regex-translator
Convert a Regular Expression from one flavour to another.
Table of Contents
Background
I love regex! It's extremely useful and I practice it nigh religiously but there's a catch: regular expressions have never had a singular, definitive standard that has really taken off and, as a result, each regex engine has its own slightly different variation on the core syntax. For example: PCRE has the most features and is the flavour most commonly used in user-facing applications but I primarily program in Javascript nowadays which has its own standard for regex (ECMA) and I use Vim as my text editor which uses its own hyper-idiomatic version of regular expressions! Eventually, I got tired of the headaches from manually converting between regex flavours so I created this, a NodeJS package and CLI application for converting between regex flavours with relative ease. regex-translator lays a simple, data-driven foundation which can be expanded upon to one day be able to perfectly interpolate between all regex flavours. In its current state, it's not perfect but it has proved to be effective for my needs, converting between some of the more major regex flavours.
Supported Regex Flavours
| ID | "Standard" | Uses |
|---|---|---|
basic | Posix.2 "Basic Regular Expression" (BRE) | grep, ed and C (<regex.h>) |
extended | Posix.2 "Extended Regular Expressions" (ERE) | egrep, BASH and C (<regex.h>) |
pcre | Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) | PCRE library, Perl, PHP, and many others. |
vim | Vim Pattern | Vim |
ecma | ECMAscript RegExp | Javascript, Web Browsers, ~Java |
re2 | RE2 | GoLang, ~Python |
'Standard' is in quotes there because regular expressions are quite tenuously specified in the best of cases: POSIX's regular expression standard is quite vague and largely obsolete and much of the format specification for other regex flavours comes from high-level end-user-targeted documentation.
regex-translator in no way purports to be fast or memory efficient but it does strive to be useful, simple, and transparent in its operation.
Install
npm install regex-translator
to install it to a local package or
npm install --global regex-translator
to install it globally.
Usage
To use the command-line interface npx regex-translator or just regex-translator if installed globally.
CLI
regex-translator
Convert a Regular Expression from one flavour to another.
Options
-h, --help Writes this help text to STDOUT.
-n, --noop [Reserved] Show what would be done without actually doing it.
-v, --verbose Verbose output to STDERR.
-V, --version Writes version information to STDOUT.
-x, --no-quick-exit Don't immediately exit after printing help, version, and/or config
information.
-i, --stdin Read input from STDIN.
-I, --input string The path to the file to read input from.
-R, --input-regex-string string The input regular expression as a string.
-F, --input-flavour string The flavour of the input regex.
-T, --output-flavour string The flavour to convert to input regex to.
-o, --stdout Write output to STDOUT.
-O, --output string The name of the file to write output to.
-p, --pasteboard Copy output to pasteboard (clipboard).
-c, --config Print search paths and configuration values to STDOUT.
-C, --config-file string [Resevred] Use the given config file instead of the default.
API
const RegexTranslator = require('regex-translator');
See API.md for full API.
Contributing
Changes are tracked in CHANGELOG.md.
License
MIT ©2020 Anadian
SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE
This project's documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.