Steve's chained method calls that apply to all elements in a collection [2],
S{'[one]','[two]','[three]'}:sub(2,-2):upper():printall() -->
output: ONE TWO THREE
reminded me of jQuery [3]. I think there may be other applications of
this design pattern. As a test, [1] implements a basic string
pattern/substitution library along this idea.
assert(
sq('<p>this is a <a href="/">test</a> http://lua-users.org
http://lua.org </p>')
:match("<[^>]*>")
:invert()
:match('http://[^ ]+')
:filter('user')
:replace(function(s) return '<a href="' .. s .. '">' .. s .. '</a>' end)
== '<p>this is a <a href="/">test</a> <a href="http://lua-users.org";>' ..
'http://lua-users.org</a> http://lua.org </p>'
)
Another idea is perhaps to apply it to source code AST transformations
(not unlike XHTML used in jQuery).
[1] http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringQuery
[2] http://lua-users.org/wiki/SequenceAdapters
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery