Greppy

Deprecation Notice

Greppy is going to be phased away in favor of the PHPVerbalExpressions project.

Why use Greppy?

• Isolate your regex patterns and matching so they can be easily mocked inside unit tests
• Represent important and recurrent patterns with custom pattern classes
• Write more human-readable regular expressions with a fluent API using the FluentPattern object.

Feature Guide

Bootstrap

$p = new Relax\Greppy\Pattern();

Custom pattern objects

With Greppy, you can define pattern objects – types – to easily define, reuse and maintain common patterns used in web applications.

If you use regex to match domain, for instance, instead of doing:

preg_match("/^(http|https|ftp)://([A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*(?:.[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*)+):?(d+)?/?/i", $subject);

You may define a DomainPattern type, such as:

namespace Your\Namespace;

use Relax\Greppy\Pattern;

class DomainPattern implements Pattern
{
    public function __toString()
    {
        return "/^(http|https|ftp)://([A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*(?:.[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*)+):?(d+)?/?/";
    }
}

And use it like this:

$domain = new Your\Namespace\DomainPattern();
$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("http://www.google.com");
$m->caseless()->matches($domain); // true

The predefined Pattern object

Matching any single character

The PHP way:

preg_match("/./", "any"); // 1

The Greppy way:

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("any");
$m->matches($p->any()); // true

Matching any digit

The PHP way:

preg_match("/\d/", "5"); // 1

The Greppy way:

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("5");
$m->matches($p->digit()); // true

Matching a literal

The PHP way:

preg_match("/e/", "hey"); // 1

The Greppy way:

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("hey");
$m->matches($p->literal("e")); // true

Matching a group of literals

The PHP way:

preg_match("/[abc]/", "anthem"); // 1

The Greppy way:

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("anthem");
$m->matches($p->literal("a", "b", "c")); // true

Matching a range

The PHP way:

preg_match("/[a-z]/", "any"); // 1

The Greppy way:

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("any");
$m->matches($p->range("a", "z")); // true

Matching a repetition

The PHP way:

preg_match("/z{3}/", "wazzzup"); // 1
preg_match("/z{2,4}/", "wazzzzup"); // 1

The Greppy way:

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("wazzzup");
$m->matches($p->repetition("z", 3)); // true

$m = new Relax\Greppy\SimpleMatcher("wazzzzup"); 
$m->matches($p->repetition("z", 2, 4)); // true