Alternative Regex Syntax

This page lists projects that provide an alternative to traditional regex syntax, e.g. POSIX [[:digit:]]+ or Perl \d+.

It's freely editable, so please add your projects here.

Related: Alternative Shells

Regex / Regular Language Projects

• Oil's Egg Expressions
  • Translates to POSIX ERE for use with grep, awk, sed
  • Literal strings are quoted; operators are unquoted / unescaped
  • Reuse and composition of of patterns
• Perl 6 Patterns
  • Literal strings are quoted; operators are unquoted / unescaped
• Verbal Expressions - A JavaScript library that helps to construct difficult regular expressions
• kleenexp - modern regular expression syntax everywhere with a painless upgrade path
• SRL - Simple Regex Language. Regular Expressions Made Simple ([Hacker News Comments])(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384862)
• Super Expressive - A zero-dependency JavaScript library for building regular expressions in (almost) natural language (Hacker News Comments)
• Melody - Melody is a language that compiles to regular expressions and aims to be more easily readable and maintainable

Lisp-Like Syntax

• Emacs' Rx Expressions - Structured regex notation based on s-expressions built into Emacs
• Scheme Regular Expressions - first introduced in SCSH as an s-expression based alternative to the more common string based description.
• luna - A Clojure DSL That Translates to Regex (Hacker News Comments)

Parsing Libraries

PEG, etc.

• Rosie Pattern Language

Links

• https://wiki.c2.com/?AlternativesToRegularExpressions (as of 2022, last edited in 2014)