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);
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...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:

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