The Text.Regex.TDFA module provides a backend for regular expressions. It provides instances for the classes defined and documented in Text.Regex.Base and re-exported by this module. If you import this along with other backends then you should do so with qualified imports (with renaming for convenience).

This regex-tdfa package implements, correctly, POSIX extended regular expressions. It is highly unlikely that the regex-posix package on your operating system is correct, see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Regex_Posix for examples of your OS's bugs.

Importing and using

Declare a dependency on the regex-tdfa library in your .cabal file:

build-depends: regex-tdfa ^>= 1.3.2

In Haskell modules where you want to use regexes simply import this module:

import Text.Regex.TDFA

Basics

>>> let emailRegex = "[a-zA-Z0-9+._-]+\\@[-a-zA-Z]+\\.[a-z]+"
>>> "my email is first-name.lastname_1974@e-mail.com" =~ emailRegex :: Bool
True

>>> "invalid@mail@com" =~ emailRegex :: Bool
False

>>> "invalid@mail.COM" =~ emailRegex :: Bool
False

>>> "#@invalid.com" =~ emailRegex :: Bool
False

-- non-monadic
λ> <to-match-against> =~ <regex>

-- monadic, uses fail on lack of match
λ> <to-match-against> =~~ <regex>

(=~) and (=~~) are polymorphic in their return type. This is so that regex-tdfa can pick the most efficient way to give you your result based on what you need. For instance, if all you want is to check whether the regex matched or not, there's no need to allocate a result string. If you only want the first match, rather than all the matches, then the matching engine can stop after finding a single hit.

This does mean, though, that you may sometimes have to explicitly specify the type you want, especially if you're trying things out at the REPL.

Common use cases

Get the first match

-- returns empty string if no match
a =~ b :: String  -- or ByteString, or Text...

>>> "alexis-de-tocqueville" =~ "[a-z]+" :: String
"alexis"

>>> "alexis-de-tocqueville" =~ "[0-9]+" :: String
""

Check if it matched at all

a =~ b :: Bool

>>> "alexis-de-tocqueville" =~ "[a-z]+" :: Bool
True

Get first match + text before/after

-- if no match, will just return whole
-- string in the first element of the tuple
a =~ b :: (String, String, String)

>>> "alexis-de-tocqueville" =~ "de" :: (String, String, String)
("alexis-","de","-tocqueville")

>>> "alexis-de-tocqueville" =~ "kant" :: (String, String, String)
("alexis-de-tocqueville","","")

Get first match + submatches

-- same as above, but also returns a list of just submatches.
-- submatch list is empty if regex doesn't match at all
a =~ b :: (String, String, String, [String])

>>> "div[attr=1234]" =~ "div\\[([a-z]+)=([^]]+)\\]" :: (String, String, String, [String])
("","div[attr=1234]","",["attr","1234"])

Get all matches

-- can also return Data.Array instead of List
getAllTextMatches (a =~ b) :: [String]

>>> getAllTextMatches ("john anne yifan" =~ "[a-z]+") :: [String]
["john","anne","yifan"]

>>> getAllTextMatches ("* - . a + z" =~ "[--z]+") :: [String]
["-",".","a","z"]

Feature support

This package does provide captured parenthesized subexpressions.

Depending on the text being searched this package supports Unicode. The [Char], Text, Text.Lazy, and (Seq Char) text types support Unicode. The ByteString and ByteString.Lazy text types only support ASCII.

As of version 1.1.1 the following GNU extensions are recognized, all anchors:

• \` at beginning of entire text
• \' at end of entire text
• \< at beginning of word
• \> at end of word
• \b at either beginning or end of word
• \B at neither beginning nor end of word

The above are controlled by the newSyntax Bool in CompOption.

Where the "word" boundaries means between characters that are and are not in the [:word:] character class which contains [a-zA-Z0-9_]. Note that \< and \b may match before the entire text and \> and \b may match at the end of the entire text.

There is no locale support, so collating elements like [.ch.] are simply ignored and equivalence classes like [=a=] are converted to just [a]. The character classes like [:alnum:] are supported over ASCII only, valid classes are alnum, digit, punct, alpha, graph, space, blank, lower, upper, cntrl, print, xdigit, word.

>>> getAllTextMatches ("john anne yifan" =~ "[[:lower:]]+") :: [String]
["john","anne","yifan"]

This package does not provide "basic" regular expressions. This package does not provide back references inside regular expressions.

The package does not provide Perl style regular expressions. Please look at the regex-pcre and pcre-light packages instead.

This package does not provide find-and-replace.

Avoiding backslashes

If you find yourself writing a lot of regexes, take a look at raw-strings-qq. It'll let you write regexes without needing to escape all your backslashes.

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}

import Text.RawString.QQ
import Text.Regex.TDFA

λ> "2 * (3 + 1) / 4" =~ [r|\([^)]+\)|] :: String
"(3 + 1)"