regex-patterns

What This Skill Does

The regex-patterns skill serves as an extensive, built-in library for regular expression management. Instead of relying on guesswork or generic search engine results, this skill provides vetted, production-ready regex strings for common validation, extraction, and transformation tasks. It covers the syntax differences between engine implementations in Python, JavaScript, and Go, ensuring the pattern provided will work within your specific execution context.

Installation

You can install this skill by running the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/gitgoodordietrying/regex-patterns

Use Cases

This skill is designed for developers, data analysts, and system administrators who frequently interact with text processing. Common use cases include:

• Input Validation: Ensuring user-submitted emails, phone numbers, and IP addresses meet specific formatting requirements before they hit your database.
• Log Parsing: Quickly extracting timestamps, process IDs, or error codes from unstructured server logs or command-line output.
• Bulk Refactoring: Performing complex search-and-replace operations in large codebases—such as migrating import paths or renaming variables while preserving specific formatting rules.
• Debugging: Identifying why a regex pattern is failing to match intended targets by providing structural analysis of lookaheads, lookbehinds, and greedy vs. lazy quantifiers.
• Data Cleaning: Stripping unwanted whitespace, HTML tags, or sensitive information from scraped or user-provided data.

Example Prompts

1. "I need a regex pattern to validate a standard US phone number that works in JavaScript and handles parentheses and dashes. Can you help?"
2. "Extract all IPv4 addresses from this text file output and give me the pattern I should use in Python's re module."
3. "Why is my regex .* failing to match the text on the next line, and how can I modify it to be non-greedy or include newlines?"

Tips & Limitations

Regex is incredibly powerful but can become a maintenance burden if patterns are overly complex. When using this skill, always prefer readability; complex regex with multiple nested groups can be difficult for other developers to maintain. If a pattern requires massive amounts of lookaheads or complex logic, consider breaking it into multiple, smaller processing steps. Note that this skill provides patterns for standardized engines; always test against your specific language implementation, as Go's RE2 engine, for instance, does not support lookarounds. Use the provided cookbook for common patterns, but perform unit testing on edge cases like malformed emails or non-standard URL formats to ensure your implementation remains secure.