Regular Expression Literals

Regular expressions are a powerful technique for pattern matching in strings. Vala has experimental support for regular expression literals (/regex/). Example:

string email = "[email protected]";
if (/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i.match(email)) {
    stdout.printf("Valid email address\n");
}

The trailing i makes the expression case insensitive. You can store a regular expression in a variable of type Regex:

Regex regex = /foo/;

A example of regular expression replacement:

var r = /(foo|bar|cow)/;
var o = r.replace ("this foo is great", -1, 0, "thing");
print ("%s\n", o);

The following trailing characters can be used:

• i, letters in the pattern match both upper- and lowercase letters

• m, the "start of line" and "end of line" constructs match immediately following or immediately before any newline in the string, respectively, as well as at the very start and end.

• s, a dot metacharater . in the pattern matches all characters, including newlines. Without it, newlines are excluded.

• x, whitespace data characters in the pattern are totally ignored except when escaped or inside a character class.