Functional Regex

Functional Regex simplifies the way you work with global regular expressions in JavaScript.

Functional Regex aims to simplify the process of iterating over a global regular expression. It is often easier to treat the results of a globally matched regular expression as an array. It is then possible to use map, reduce, forEach, some, filter, etc on the results.

Example

When looking for something like /foo(test)/g it's necessary to do:

var regex = /foo(test)/g,
    result;
 
while ((result = regex.exec(test)) !== null) {
  // do something with result
};

Wouldn't it be nice if we could do something more like:

var fregex = require('functional-regex');
 
fregex(/[\d+]/g, '1. There is 2 numbers in this string'); // == ['1', '2']

Because it's simply an array, we can use forEach and map on it as well as other array methods.

var fregex = require('functional-regex');
 
fregex(/[\d+]/g, '1. There is 2 numbers in this string')
  .map(function(x) {
    return parseInt(x, 10);
  }); // == [1, 2]

Installation

npm install --save functional-regex

Usage

There are three ways to use Functional Regex.

1. Standalone (default, because extending native prototypes is evil)
2. Legacy (also does not modify prototypes)
3. Augmenting the RegExp prototype

1. Standalone

var fregex = require('functional-regex');
 
fregex(regex, text); // => array

2. Standalone (legacy)

var fregex = require('functional-regex');
 
fregex.forEach(regex, text, iteratorFn);
fregex.map(regex, text, iteratorFn);

3. RegExp prototype

require('functional-regex').addToRegExp();
 
var regex = /foo/g;
 
regex.forEach(text, iteratorFn);
regex.map(text, iteratorFn);

Contributing

Open an issue, or submit a pull-request.