Reuse Replacement in Regex.replace

[i-am-the-slime]

Right now the signature of replace on regex is:

foreign import replace :: Regex -> String -> String -> String

and I argue it should be

foreign import replace :: Regex -> Replacement -> String -> String

Of course this would be breaking so potentially there should be an alternative under a different name and the old one could be made deprecated.

What do you think?

[MonoidMusician]

I actually wouldn't use the Replacement type here, because it is not a literal string being inserted but a string with special syntax:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/replace#specifying_a_string_as_the_replacement

So I guess if you want to be specific, it should take a new type, and we should expose functions for building that type according to the syntax or something. I personally don't care enough to do that 😅

[michaelficarra]

it should take a new type, and we should expose functions for building that type according to the syntax or something

This would be nice, actually. Not only would it make it easier to use the magic patterns by name instead of having to look them up every time, but it would also allow consumers to not worry about having to escape $ if they're trying to include a literal $ in their replacement. I think it's worth it.

If wanted to give consumers an unsafe out to avoid having to build up a sequence of these "replacement parts", you could have a function that parses a replacement string into the sequence for them automagically. Seems like you get the best of both worlds that way.