luapatt 0.9.0b5

Description:

luapatt 0.9.0b5

A Python 3.3+ implementation of the Lua language’s pattern matching
functions. Lua’s pattern matching is simpler than regular expressions
and lacks several features that regexes have, such as | for
alternation, but also contains some features difficult or impossible to
duplicate in most regex flavors, such as the ability to easily match a
balanced pair of parentheses (or any two other characters).

Installation
pip install luapatt


Documentation
For documentation on how pattern matching works, please read the Lua
reference manual. This library contains the following differences from
stock Lua:

%c, %g, %p, and their negated counterparts are not
available; attempting to use them will raise the built-in
NotImplementedError.
Other character classes that rely on the meaning of a character call
Python’s str.is* family of methods, and so use the Unicode
definition of that meaning.
String positions are zero-based instead of one-based, reflecting the
fact that Python is generally zero-based (as opposed to Lua, which
has one-based indexes). This affects position captures and the
indexes returned as the first two results from find().
Function return values are combined into a tuple, as is standard with
Python. However, singleton tuples are not returned; the single value
is returned directly instead.
gsub() does not return the number of substitutions by default,
instead returning only the new string. To get the count, pass the
named argument count=True to the call (which will result in a
2-tuple of the new string and the count).
An extra function, set_escape_char(), is provided to change the
escape character. It takes one argument: the new escape character,
which must be a str object of length 1. The escape character
cannot be set to any of the other special characters. While it is
possible to set it to a letter or number, this is not recommended as
it may interfere with other aspects of pattern matching, and doing so
may be disallowed in the future.

NOTE: Because set_escape_char modifies global state, it is
not thread-safe.


Unlike Lua, which has no notion of a Unicode string and assumes all
characters are one byte in length, this library operates on full
Unicode strings (i.e. str objects). If you pass bytes objects to
this library, the behavior is undefined.



Licensing
As with Lua itself, this library is released under the MIT License.