Regular Expressions

Using with pattern matching to bind captured groups

The pattern matching library trivia provides a system trivia.ppcre that allows captured groups to be bound through pattern matching

(trivia:match "John Doe"
  ((trivia.ppcre:ppcre "(.*)\\W+(.*)" first-name last-name)
   (list :first-name first-name :last-name last-name)))

;; => (:FIRST-NAME "John" :LAST-NAME "Doe")

Note: the library Optima provides a similar facility in the system optima.ppcre

Binding register groups with CL-PPCRE

CL-PPCRE:REGISTER-GROUPS-BIND will match a string against a regular expression, and if it matches, bind register groups in the regex to variables. If the string does not match, NIL is returned.

(defun parse-date-string (date-string)
  (cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind
      (year month day)
      ("(\\d{4})-(\\d{2})-(\\d{2})" date-string)
    (list year month day)))

(parse-date-string "2016-07-23") ;=> ("2016" "07" "23")
(parse-date-string "foobar")     ;=> NIL
(parse-date-string "2016-7-23")  ;=> NIL