regex support?

[ghostsquad]

Is there a way to perform regex search/replace or just search?

If not, would this be desired functionality?

[sbarzowski]

It's not included in the current version, but there are plans to add regexp support and there is some progress towards it. The idea is to support a subset re2 regexes without \C (like Go's regexps).

Unfortunately it will certainly introduce (small) differences between regexps supported by the implementations. This occupies a similar place as YAML – it is very useful, but the spec is not as precise as we would like.

FYI I have also played with an alternative – parser combinators, which are in some ways superior to regexps: https://github.com/sbarzowski/jsonnet-parser-combinators. Here is an example of parsing (and evaluating) arithmetic expressions using that library: https://github.com/sbarzowski/jsonnet-parser-combinators/blob/master/examples/arithmetic.libsonnet.

[sh0rez]

In Tanka we inherited the ksonnet / kubecfg native funcs, which directly expose Go standard library utilities:

• https://tanka.dev/jsonnet/native#regexmatch
• https://tanka.dev/jsonnet/native#regexsubst
• https://tanka.dev/jsonnet/native#escapestringregex

Not having too much experience with them, but some people seem to use them and I did not hear any complaints so far

[ghost]

I would suggest adding regex support (search, replace) and specify it as using the re2 spec. You won't find a better specified and more cross-language spec or regular expressions than re2 I think.