I'm using the re-find function in clojure, and have something like this:
(defn some-function []
(re-find #"(?i)blah" "some sentence"))
What I would like is to make the "blah" dynamic, so I substituted a var for blah like this, but it doesn't work:
(defn some-function2 [some-string]
(re-find #(str "(?i)" some-string) "some sentence"))
I'm surprised this doesn't work since LISP is supposed to "treat code like data".
Use the function re-pattern. #"" is just a reader macro (aka. syntactic sugar for creating regex)
#(str "(?i)" some-string) is reader macro to create an anonymous functions.
re-pattern is the easiest way to do this. It builds up a regex pattern from a string. To answer OP's question, you could do (re-find (re-pattern (str "(?i)" some-string)) "some sentence").To create a pattern from a string value in Clojure you can use re-pattern:
(re-pattern (str "(?i)" some-string))
One thing you don't mention is whether some-string is expected to contain a valid regex or whether it's an arbitrary string value. If some-string is an arbitrary string value (that you want to match exactly) you should quote it before using it to build your regex:
(re-pattern (str "(?i)" (java.util.regex.Pattern/quote some-string)))
some-stringisn't a var. It's just a function parameter.