Patter.Net 2.0.4

Patter.net

A simple pattern matching library for fluently extracting patterned data from text.

Rationale

I frequently find myself trying to pull a bit of structured data out of a stream of text. Regex is an amazingly powerful tool, but I have always struggled to get it to return structured results, and frequently just end up writing my own little parser to extract the information I want. Patter is a simple library to describe seeking and grabbing the chunks of data you want without the complexity of Regex.

• Is it more powerful than Regex? Absolutely not, if Regex is your jam, use Regex.
• Is it easier to read and get data out? In many cases (and in my honest opinion) yes.

Extracting text

You use PatterBuilder<string> to define a Pattern which knows how to extract data from a string.

For example:

var pattern = new PatternBuilder<string>()
    .SeekPast("<foo>")
    .CaptureUntil("</foo>")
    .Build();

var results = pattern.Matches("Show <foo>one</foo> and <foo>two</foo>");

returns a list of strings,

["one","two"]

Extracting complex objects

Let's say you want to extract anchors from a blob of textinto an object (Alink):

public class ALink
{
   public string Text {get;set;}
   public Uri Url {get;set;}
}

And then define a pattern using PatternBuilder with ALink as the result type:

    // define a patter to return enumeration of ALink objects.
    var pattern = new PatternBuilder<ALink>()
        // seek to <a 
        .Seek("<a") 
        // seek past href attribute
        .SeekPast("href=") 
        // skip quotes if there any 
        .Skip(Chars.Quotes) 
        // Capture everything up to closing tag or end quote, and convert it a Uri and store in Alink.Url
        .CaptureUntil(">'\"".ToArray(), (context) => context.Match.Url = new Uri(context.MatchText))
        // skip quotes if there any 
        .Skip(Chars.Quotes)
        // seek past end of opening tag
        .SeekPast(">") 
        // capture everything up to the close </a tag and put it into the Alink.Text 
        .CaptureUntil("</a", (context) => context.Match.Text = context.MatchText.Trim())
        .Build(); 

    var matches = pattern.Matches("this is a <a href=\"http://foo.com\">link1</a> <a href=http://bar.com>link2</a>").ToList();
    Debug.WriteLine(JsonConvert.SeriializeObject(matches));

This will extract the text and urls from the tags. It's an enumerable, so you can use LINQ statements to further manipulate the results.

[
    { 
          "Text":"link1"
          "Url":"http://foo.com"
    },
    { 
          "Text":"link2"
          "Url":"http://bar.com"
    }
]

Methods

PatternContext

The PatternContext object represents the current state of parser and is passed to It has the following properties of interest

Chars

The Chars class defines classes of useful characters for matching:

Example:

  var pattern = new PatternBuilder<string>()
     .SeekPast("Name:")
     .Skip(Chars.Whitespace)
     .Capture(Chars.LettersOrDigits)
     .SkipPast(Chars.EOL)
     .Build();

Technical notes

Patterns are 100% reusable and thread safe (meaning multiple threads can be evaluating a Patter pattern against strings safely).

Changes from 1.x

Version was bumped to major 2.x for semantic versioning rules, aka it has breaking changes which clean up the usage around character matching methods.

• Switched to PatternBuilder().Build() ⇒ Pattern(), which makes it clearer when you are defining the pattern versus using the pattern. Only Pattern(T)() has Matches() method.
• functions were simplified to simply using char[] as the signature to know it's character based pattern, renaming methods like SeekChars() ⇒ Seek(char[] )
• char[] methods as appropriate use params nomenclature, so you can write .Skip('x','y','z')