On his blog today, Jonnay has posted information about a new library he's built up called "BunnyRegex", a way to make easy regular expressions and mini-languages inside of PHP.

Regular expressions are hard. They are hard to create, and even harder to read after the fact. Regular expressions, while quite powerful, are a blight upon readable code. There is no easy way to know that '/^\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}$/' is a search for a string in the form of 'xxxx/xx/xx'. You have to know that ^ is the start of a line, \d is a digit, \/ is / escaped, etc.

Granted, once you know regular expressions, that information is portable across which ever language you use, be it PHP, Perl, Javascript, whatever. But getting to that point is not easy, and even after you are there, the fact remains:Regular expressions are not human parseable. This is where BunnyRegex comes in.

He includes examples of the usage of the library (not as concise as a regex, but easier to read) and how you can also use it to create "fluent regular expressions". The library even allows you to do most of the normal things you would with a standard regex engine - match, grep, replace, and splitting data.