Clojure:
Using regular expressions

How to:

Clojure, staying true to its roots in the Lisp family, offers a rich set of functions that interface seamlessly with Java’s regular expression capabilities. Here’s how you can leverage them:

Basic Matching

To check if a string matches a pattern, use re-matches. It returns the entire match if successful or nil otherwise.

(re-matches #"\d+" "123")  ;=> "123"
(re-matches #"\d+" "abc")  ;=> nil

Searching for Patterns

To find the first occurrence of a pattern, re-find is your go-to function:

(re-find #"\d+" "Order 123")  ;=> "123"

Capturing Groups

Use re-find along with parentheses in your pattern to capture groups:

(let [[_ area code] (re-find #"(1)?(\d{3})" "Phone: 123-4567")]
  (println "Area Code:" area "Code:" code))
;; Output: Area Code: nil Code: 123

Global Search (Find All Matches)

Clojure doesn’t have a built-in global search like some languages. Instead, use re-seq to get a lazy sequence of all matches:

(re-seq #"\d+" "id: 123, qty: 456")  ;=> ("123" "456")

Splitting Strings

To split a string based on a pattern, use clojure.string/split:

(clojure.string/split "John,Doe,30" #",")  ;=> ["John" "Doe" "30"]

Replacing

Replace parts of a string matching a pattern with clojure.string/replace:

(clojure.string/replace "2023-04-01" #"\d{4}" "YYYY")  ;=> "YYYY-04-01"

Third-party Libraries

Though Clojure’s built-in support suffices for most cases, for more complex scenarios, consider using libraries such as clojure.spec for robust data validation and reagent for reactive DOM manipulation in web applications with regex-based routing and input validation.

;; Example using clojure.spec for validating an email
(require '[clojure.spec.alpha :as s])
(s/def ::email (s/and string? #(re-matches #".+@.+\..+" %)))
(s/valid? ::email "[email protected]")  ;=> true

Remember, while regular expressions are powerful, they can also make code hard to read and maintain. Use them judiciously and always consider simpler string manipulation functions where possible.