Why can't Regular Expressions use keywords instead of characters?

Question

Okay, I barely understand RegEx basics, but why couldn\'t they design it to use keywords (like SQL) instead of some cryptic wildcard characters and symbols?

Is it for pe

Answer 1

It's actually pretty easy to implement a "wordier" form of regex -- please see my answer here. In a nutshell: write a handful of functions that return regex strings (and take parameters if necessary).