JADE Environment Development Ideas

Overview

The proposal is to provide a Pattern Matching API be added to the JADE product. This would be provided as a set of JADE classes.

Objective

A key objective of the proposal is:

• To make it easier for developers by reducing the amount of hand rolled string parsing and manipulation code.

• To provide powerful and useful utility methods based on standard pattern matching techniques.

• Allow developers to leverage standard patterns such as for email validation.

• Use of this feature should improve the long-term read-ability and test-ability of JADE code.

Feature Summary

• Pattern based Find e.g finding a number e.g 3.14

• Pattern based Match e.g check that a credit card number is of the correct format

• Pattern based Splitting e.g splitting a string based on a set of delimiters or pattern

• Pattern based Replacing e.g. replacing \\\\ with // in a directory path

• Access to captured groups, if required

• Case and case insensitive capability, for when case matters

• Word boundary and other regex anchors

• Multiple line operations for large bodies of text

• API support for returning first only or all occurrences from an operation

• Work with both ANSI and Unicode versions of JADE

• Probably based on the PCRE library dialect

Proposed JADE API

A double API is proposed:

First a simple Type Method based one for one off simple operations

JadeRegex@isMatch( text:String; pattern:String; ignoreCase:Boolean; options:Integer64):Boolean;
e.g. isDecimal := JadeRegex@isMatch("3.14", "\\d+\\.d+", false, Option_None);

A second fuller one requiring more programming overhead for repeated and complicated operations

JadeRegexPattern::compile(pattern:String; ignoreCase:Boolean; options:Integer64);
JadeRegexPattern::isMatch( text:String):Boolean;
e.g.
regexPattern : RegexPattern;
create regexPattern;
regexPattern.compile("\\d+\\.d+", false, Option_None);
isDecimal := regexPattern.isMatch("100.0");

New Classes

The JADE Regex Library shall consist of several RootSchema classes.

JadeRegex: Simple Type method only API

JadeRegexPattern: A compiled regex pattern

JadeRegexResult: An iterable result of matches, essentially an array of match tuples

JadeRegexMatch: An individual match tuple giving rich information about a match.
Has properties: value, length, position, index.

JadeRegexCapture: An individual capture group tuple giving rich information about a capture, effectively a sub-match. Has properties: value, length, position, index.