scanf style parsing

[Skip Montanaro]

    Greg> The syntax conventionally used for REs is atrocious for anything
    Greg> beyond the simplest cases, IMO.

Yeah, that's why Ping wrote the module he did (can't remember the name at
the moment) that sits as a layer above the old regex module.  In my own
stuff I wrote an application-specific higher-level encoding that "compiles"
to regular expressions:

    http://musi-cal.mojam.com/help-patterns.shtml

It can generate some truly horrendous regular expressions, and I'm not doing
anything particularly fancy.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com)
http://www.mojam.com/
http://www.musi-cal.com/