The best resource for this question is the Palo Alto cascading example tutorial. It's in java and provides examples of a lot of use cases, including writing custom functions.
https://github.com/Cascading/CoPA/wiki
And yes, writing a function that allows an input regex that references other argument inputs is your best option.
public class SampleFunction extends BaseOperation implements Function
{
public void operate( FlowProcess flowProcess, FunctionCall functionCall )
{
TupleEntry argument = functionCall.getArguments();
String regex = argument.getString( 0 );
String argument = argument.getString( 1 );
String parsed = someRegexOperation();
Tuple result = new Tuple();
result.add( parsed );
functionCall.getOutputCollector().add( result );
}
}