A parser for regular expressions in PHP?

Question

I need to parse regular expressions into their components in PHP. I have no problem creating the regular expressions or executing them, but I want to display information about t

Answer 1

The perl module YAPE::Regex::Explain module can probably be ported to PHP pretty easy. Here is an example of its output

C:\>perl -e "use YAPE::Regex::Explain;print YAPE::Regex::Explain->new(qr/['-])->explain;"
The regular expression:

(?-imsx:['-])

matches as follows:

NODE                     EXPLANATION
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(?-imsx:                 group, but do not capture (case-sensitive)
                         (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not
                         matching \n) (matching whitespace and #
                         normally):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  ['-]                     any character of: ''', '-'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
)                        end of grouping
----------------------------------------------------------------------



C:\>perl -e "use YAPE::Regex::Explain; print YAPE::Regex::Explain->new(qr/(\w+), ?(.)/)->explain;"
The regular expression:

(?-imsx:(\w+), ?(.))

matches as follows:

NODE                     EXPLANATION
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(?-imsx:                 group, but do not capture (case-sensitive)
                         (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not
                         matching \n) (matching whitespace and #
                         normally):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  (                        group and capture to \1:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    \w+                      word characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _) (1 or
                             more times (matching the most amount
                             possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of \1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  ,                        ','
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   ?                       ' ' (optional (matching the most amount
                           possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  (                        group and capture to \2:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    .                        any character except \n
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of \2
----------------------------------------------------------------------
)                        end of grouping
----------------------------------------------------------------------

C:\>

You can look at the source code and quickly see the implementation.