C++Talk.NET

Marcus · Guest

I've seen that the library technical report includes a regular
expression library.
However, since regular expressions use a lot of backslashes (w, 1,
etc.) and they are escape characters in C++ strings, the programmer has
to write things like this: "\w" and "\\" for regexps "w" and "\",
respectively.
Have raw-strings been considered to simplify these cases?

For example, Python and D work like this:
r"w" == "\w"
r"c:tsd" == "c:\tsd"

(D has an alternate syntax for this feature, using backticks: `w`,
which allow double quotes inside the string)

C# uses an @ before the string (@"c:omf" == "c:\omf").

IMHO, this kind of lexical sugar makes the language a lot easier to
work with (at least for those who use regexps and such) and they don't
complicate the language (it's just a lexical change).

PS: From the D language, there are other little things i would like to
see in C++, such as thousand separators (123_456 == 123456 ==
1_2_3_4_5_6) and hex strings. However, people may think i just want to
copy lots of features and make one language look like another...

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