Basic usage

The Engine loads Regular Expression pattern templates written in *.json files from the provided directory, builds and compiles them in the following fashion:

example of template models/dates.json:

{
  "day": [
    "3[01]",
    "[12][0-9]",
    "0?[1-9]"
  ],
  "month": [
    "0?[1-9]",
    "1[012]"
  ],
  "year": [
    "\\d{4}"
  ],
  "date": [
    "{{day}}/{{month}}/{{year}}",
    "{{year}}-{{month}}-{{day}}"
  ],
  "patterns": [
    "{{date}}"
  ]
}

will result in the following regex:

(?P<date_0>(?P<day_0>[12][0-9]|0?[1-9]|3[01])/(?P<month_0>0?[1-9]|1[012])/(?P<year_0>\d{4})|(?P<year_1>\d{4})-(?P<month_1>0?[1-9]|1[012])-(?P<day_1>[12][0-9]|0?[1-9]|3[01]))

It is possible to query as follows:

engine = Engine('models')
for match in parser.parse("Look at this date: 2012-20-10"):
    print(match)
    # <[Match date] span(19, 29): 2012-12-10>

    date = match.group('date')
    print(date)
    # <[Group date_0] span(19, 29): 2012-12-10>

    day = date.group('day')
    print(day)
    # <[Group day_1] span(27, 29): 10>

    month = date.group('month')
    print(month)
    # <[Group month_1] span(24, 26): 12>

    year = date.group('year')
    print(year)
    # [Group year_1] span(19, 23): 2012>

Match objects have the following attributes:

• type: the type of match (e.g. “dates”);

• match: the re.match object;

• re: the regex pattern;

• all_group_names: the name of all the children groups;

Both Match and Group objects have the following attributes:

• value: the string value of the match/group

• start: the beginning of the match/group relative to the input string

• end: the end of the group relative to the input string

• offset (start, end)

• length (end-start)

Group objects have the following attributes:

• name: the actual group name (e.g. date_1);

• key: the group key (e.g. date);

Both Match and Group objects can be serialized in dicts with the serialize() method and to a json string with the json attribute

{
  "!number": [
    "\\d"
  ],
  "abg": [
    "alpha",
    "beta",
    "gamma"
  ],
  "patterns": [
    "This is an unnamed number group: {{number}}.",
    "I can match {{abg}} and {{abg}}, and then re-match the last {{#abg}} or the second last {{#abg@2}}"
  ]
}