Inline regular expressions

Although Pomsky on its own is very powerful, there might be situations where its syntax is not expressive enough. In these rare situations, Pomsky has an escape hatch: The regex keyword allows specifying an expression that is embedded in the output verbatim, without escaping:

regex 'hello|world?'

This emits the following regular expression:

hello|world?

Note that this is dangerous and should be used only when absolutely necessary. Pomsky does not parse the content of regex expressions, so it cannot ensure that it is valid.

Regex expressions containing pipes #

Pomsky doesn’t know whether a regex expression contains pipes, and whether it is necessary to wrap it in a group when embedding it in a larger pomsky expression. For example:

'a' regex 'b|c'

What do you expect the output to be? If you think that this should produce a(?:b|c), you are mistaken. The output is:

ab|c

To get the expected output, a group must be added:

'a' regex '(?:b|c)'

The same can be achieved by adding parentheses outside like this:

'a' (regex 'a|b')

Although Pomsky usually removes redundant parentheses, these parentheses are not removed because Pomsky can’t tell if they’re needed, so it trusts you to add them only when required.

Repeated regex expressions #

Pomsky wraps a regex expression in a group if it is followed by a repetition. For example:

regex 'test.'?

This returns:

(?:test.)?

If this is not desired, include the repetition in the string literal:

regex 'test.?'