Code Generation in Action

Appendix F. Patterns for regular expressions

This book demonstrates generators written using Ruby. We understand that for a number of reasons Ruby may not be your language of choice for writing a generator. Because regular expressions are such an instrumental part of code generation, this appendix shows how you can use regular expressions in a variety of languages.

F.1. The examples

Each language implements up to four of the following examples:

• Checking a string —In this example, we check the string file.txt to see if it has the .txt extension.
• Reading key/value pairs —This example reads the key and value pairs from the string a:1;b:2;c:3. The correct output is a = 1, b = 2, and c = 3.
• Replacing tabs with commas —This example turns the ...