Why isn't the regex_replace filter already built-in yet?

[brlin-tw]

The functionality to search and replace text using regular expression patterns seems to be very useful in a template. While hooking the functionality using custom filters definitely works I wonder why it wasn't implemented as a built-in filter in the first place?

Thanks in advance!

[ThiefMaster]

Is it really that common? I have a somewhat large webapp (over 500 template files) and never had the need for doing a regex replacement in a template....

[brlin-tw]

Some reasoning I've gathered so far:

• It is implemented in Ansible, Salt, Pixip Infinity, and other downstream products that make use of Jinja2.
• There are more than 200 results of Stack Overflow related questions using [jinja2] regex as the search keyword.

This feature is required for high-precision plaintext data manipulation and is generic enough that it should be implemented upstream as a built-in filter to benefit all users, including some (like me) that can't figure out how to make use of the custom filter mechanism due to unfamiliar with Python programming in general.

[davidism]

There's not really a reason to. Publish a package that provides the filter if you think it is generally reusable.

[brlin-tw]

Publish a package that provides the filter if you think it is generally reusable.

I believe that this is not a practical option for the endusers in general.

[davidism]

If you don't want to take advantage of packaging and the community ecosystem, that's up to you. Perhaps someone else will publish it instead.