PatternBuilder API tweaks

[skeate]

What's available inside PatternBuilder right now is pretty barebones; it has enough to do what it has to do, but it feels pretty clunky manually writing out every little step.

Fortunately, much like the whole Schemable system, it's composable! So, for example, while it doesn't (right now) have a digit combinator, it's pretty easy to write one:

export const digit = PB.characterClass(false, ['0', '9'])

Also, some of the names make sense in some contexts but aren't exactly what I'd pick in others. As an example, when I was writing the docs-ts example for the module, I did things like use PB.exactly(3)(foo) instead of PB.times(3); exactly makes sense (to me) in that style, while the times naming was chosen thinking about piping (e.g. pipe(foo, PB.times(3)))

Just wanted to start a thread to get discussion on

• What helpers (like digit) should the PB module export?
• What are some better names or aliases of the existing functions?

[jacob-alford]

I'm all for adding aliases for common enough helpers, some for /[A-Z]/ or /[a-z]/ or /[A-z]/ would be nice, maybe alpha with a caps: bool option. I'm going to look through the PatternBuilder module to see if I can think of any suggestions

[skeate]

I think, at a minimum, anything that exists as a regex character class (e.g. \d which is digit, \w "word character", etc). there are also the POSIX named character classes (which have some overlap)

[jacob-alford]

So this would basically be upper, lower, alpha, digit, ..., space, ...etc?

[skeate]

Oh, another idea: number range helpers. e.g. range(20, 55) expands to something like

pipe(
  PB.characterClass(false, ['2', '4']),
  PB.then(digit),
  PB.or(pipe(
    PB.char('5'),
    PB.then(PB.characterClass(false, ['0', '5'])),
  )),
)

wouldn't be fun to write but would be immensely helpful

[jacob-alford]

That would be super helpful!