Pattern operator for PHP

Plugin for the XP Compiler which adds an ~ infix operator to the PHP language.

Examples

The pattern operator treats the following expression as a regular expression and returns the matches it generates:

if ($greeting ~ '/^H[ea]llo/') {
  // Matches!
}

if ($matches= $greeting ~ '/^H[ea]llo/') {
  // Work with $matches
}

The pattern is passed to preg_match, so the above is equivalent of writing the following:

if (preg_match($greeting, '/^H[ea]llo/')) {
  // Matches!
}

if (preg_match($greeting, '/^H[ea]llo/', $matches)) {
  // Work with $matches
}

Installation

After installing the XP Compiler into your project, also include this plugin.

$ composer require xp-framework/compiler
# ...

$ composer require xp-lang/php-pattern-operator
# ...

No further action is required.

See also

• xp-framework/compiler#130 Motivation
• https://www.perltutorial.org/perl-regular-expression/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19441521/bash-regex-operator
• https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/latest/lang_expressions.html (=~ and !~)
• https://github.com/kasei/SwiftRegex and https://github.com/johnno1962/SwiftRegex
• https://externals.io/message/4825 (PHP internals discussion, 2003)