Dude I mean in this in the most genuine, kind way: a significant aspect of being a successful programmer is using the tools in your environment. If you can’t do something without bringing in your Tool of Choice you’re artificially limiting yourself.

If your environment does not have a specific tool or functionality that you would prefer, you work around it. OpenWrt is an immensely capable OS and it manages to perform complex network operations within its (admittedly) constrained environment.

In this case you’re myopically focused on not even a specific language, but the language agnostic feature of regex capture groups. You should be asking yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your goal without this (spoiler: there are probably dozens of alternatives)

Lua is 31 years old and has been included in OpenWrt by default for 15 years.

If it’s OpenWrt then use Lua. You probably could have written a solution in the time it took you to come whine about BusyBox.

yaml

🤮