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Life & fun · February 7, 2025

Transductive regular expressions for text editing

An extension of regular expressions for text editing, with a grep-like command-line tool. If you, like me, struggle with group logic in regular expressions, you might find it useful. I wanted to do this for a very long time. It is more of a sketch or prototype. I'd really appreciate your feedback!

Transductive regular expressions for text editing launched on February 7, 2025 with 263 votes, #136 of 5,999 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

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In plain words

Transductive regular expressions for text editing is a command-line tool that extends standard regular expressions to simplify group logic for text editing tasks. Designed for users who find traditional regex group handling confusing, it offers a grep-like interface for pattern matching and text manipulation. The creator describes it as a prototype and welcomes feedback from users.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Transductive regular expressions. Contribute to c0stya/trre development by creating an account on GitHub.

Regular expressions is a great tool for searching patterns in text. But I always found it unnatural for text editing. The group logic works as a post-processor and can be complicated. Here I propose an extension to the regular expression language for pattern matching and text modification. I call it transductive regular expressions or simply trre . It introduces the : symbol to define transformations. The simplest form is a:b , which replaces a with b. I call this a transductive pair or transduction . To demonstrate the concept, I have created a command line tool trre . It feels similar to the grep -E command. echo ' cat ' | ./trre ' cat:dog ' dog A more cryptic token-by-token version: echo…from github.com

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