[Chicken-users] regex and named subpatterns

[Hans Nowak]

Hi,

In Python (and Perl, etc) it's possible to name subpatterns (or "groups") in a 
regular expression.  For example:

In [1]: import re

In [2]: s = "the quick brown fox"

In [3]: rx = re.compile("(?P<foo>quick)")

In [4]: m = rx.search(s)

In [6]: m.groups()
Out[6]: ('quick',)

In [7]: m.groupdict()
Out[7]: {'foo': 'quick'}

I can access the group named 'foo' using the groupdict() method.  Is there a way 
to do this in Chicken as well?  Apparently Chicken's regexen support the 
(?P<name>...) syntax, but I don't know if or how the groups can be accessed by name:

#;1> (use regex)
; loading library regex ...
#;2> (define s "the quick brown fox")
#;3> (define rx (regexp "(?P<foo>quick)"))
#;4> (string-search rx s)
("quick" "quick")
#;5> (string-search-positions rx s)
((4 9) (4 9))
;; ...now what? :-)

Any tips welcome...

In other "news", I am preparing a small module that provides a Python-like 
"match object".  Basically, it has a small number of functions (regex-search, 
regex-match, regex-find-all) that return these match objects (or #f if no 
match), which are basically records with accessor functions.  In some cases, 
this might be clearer than dealing with lists of lists of numbers, and/or having 
to extract the corresponding substrings by hand -- at least to my Python-addled 
brain. :-)  For example, you can do:

#;1> (define s "Bob ate 5 hamburgers")
#;3> (define rx "^(\\S+).*?(\\d+)\\s*(\\S+)s")
#;4> (define m (regex-search rx s))
#;5> m
#<rxmatch>
#;6> (rxmatch-groups m)
(("Bob" 0 3) ("5" 8 9) ("hamburger" 10 19))
#;9> (rxmatch-group m 1)
("Bob" 0 3)
#;10> (rxmatch-group-string m 3)
"hamburger"

...etc.  I don't know if this will be useful to anyone else, but if it is, I 
will make it available (after a lot of polishing and debugging, no doubt). 
Suggestions welcome.

--Hans