Regular expression patterns

Abstract

We extend Haskell with regular expression patterns. Regular expression patterns provide means for matching and extracting data which goes well beyond ordinary pattern matching as found in Haskell. It has proven useful for string manipulation and for processing structured data such as XML. Regular expression patterns can be used with arbitrary lists, and work seamlessly together with ordinary pattern matching in Haskell. Our extension is lightweight, it is little more than syntactic sugar. We present a semantics and a type system, and show how to implement it as a preprocessor to Haskell.