What's T-Regx?

T-Regx (T-Rex and RegExp) is a lightweight, high-level Regular Expressions library.

Its main features are:

• Being bulletproof:

  • Automatic delimiters for your patterns
  • Each and every unexpected situation ends in an exception
  • UTF-8 support out of the box
  • Prepared Patterns handling unsafe characters (e.g. user-input)

• Cleaning the mess after PHP regular expressions API:

  • All false positives and false negatives are eliminated
  • Special values like null, false, '' aren't used to indicate errors.
  • Unifying differences between matching, replacing, splitting - all operations
  • Results aren't a dull string[][] array, but a dedicated Match details.
  • Based on exceptions - No warnings, errors or fatal errors or notices.
  • Relieving developers from brain strain:

• Being explicit and descriptive - (why is explicit interface so important?):

  • Each function obeys SRP
  • Functionalities are represented with methods (and not flags or default arguments)
  • No default parameters
  • No flags
  • No var-args

Why is explicit interface so important?

T-Regx' aim is to relieve programmers from brain strain while reading and writing code. Our mission is to make developers write/read a line and immediately go on, without thinking about what it does or what side effects it may cause.

What's bad

While reading this code...

preg_match($pattern, $subject, $match);

...developers must stop for a moment and think:

• Will this match the first occurrence? Or all of them?
• Will the $subject match the pattern $pattern?
• Will this trigger a warning, if I mess up my regexp?
• Will this return null/false or raise a warning, on error?
• Will this return null/'', if the $subject doesn't match?
• Is $match a string[] or a string[][]?
• Will this return my value? Or my value nested in arrays?

What should be obvious, is now complicated and causes many questions and assumptions for the reader.

What's good

While using T-Regx, some things are obvious. For example:

• T-Regx
• PHP

$result = pattern($pattern)->match($subject)->first();

Here, $result must contain the first occurrence. It must contain your value.

It will never contain null, false or an empty array. MalformedPatternException would be thrown, if $pattern is malformed. It would also throw SubjectNotMatchedException if the $pattern doesn't match the $subject. Even if first() does return '', it's only because it supposed to do that; that is "when a pattern matched a string of length 0".

It also never raises any warnings or fatal errors.

Brain Strain