I have the following PEGjs productions:
NameStartChar = ":" / [A-Z] / "_" / [a-z] / [\u00C0-\u00D6] / [\u00D8-\u00F6] / [\u00F8-\u02FF] / [\u0370-\u037D] /
[\u037F-\u1FFF] / [\u200C-\u200D] / [\u2070-\u218F] / [\u2C00-\u2FEF] / [\u3001-\uD7FF] /
[\uF900-\uFDCF] / [\uFDF0-\uFFFD] / [\uD800-\uDB7F][\uDC00-\uDFFF]
NameChar = NameStartChar / "-" / "." / [0-9] / "\u00B7" / [\u0300-\u036F] / [\u203F-\u2040]
Name = NameStartChar NameChar*
I'd like to somehow get true if my input string matches Name, and false otherwise. I also don't care about parsing out the component parts.
However, PEGjs really wants to throw an exception if the match fails.
I could of course wrap it in a try/catch, but I'd prefer to avoid that. And I'd like to avoid collecting the parsed components as well (i.e., I don't need ["a", ["b", "c", "d"]] when matching "abcd", I just need true).
Is there some hidden PEGjs feature that will make this work? Maybe a clever action, or an innovative use of combinators?
Or perhaps I should be using an entirely different tool, and not a parser-generator? If so, does anyone know what I should be using?
We can use Name { return true } / { return false } to get an expression that will return true if the rule matched. Then, we can add !. to check that we are at the end of the input for the true case, and .* to skip to the end in the false case. So we get:
ValidateName = Name !. { return true } / .* { return false }