DEV Community

Discussion on: I hated Regex so much that I made iHateRegex.io

 
geongeorge profile image
Geon George

Thank you. I need to improve the explanations as well. (Will fix those :) )

at some point, I really felt embarrassed to share this.
It's been sitting in my Github for a while and I finally decided to share and see what everyone else thinks about it.
Your feedback has been of great help :D (there is also a beginners tutorial article in the making)

Thread Thread
 
hyftar profile image
Simon Landry

If your repo is public, I'd be glad to help with a PR or two! 😊

Thread Thread
 
geongeorge profile image
Geon George

Here you go 😊:
github.com/geongeorge/i-hate-regex

The code is not the most elegant (I have to warn you)

Thread Thread
 
iamschulz profile image
Daniel Schulz • Edited

Regex is not the right tool for validating email addresses

Huh. I always do complex stuff like this with regex, in frontend as well as in backend.
What would be your tool of choice?

Thread Thread
 
hyftar profile image
Simon Landry • Edited

Depends on the language, in PHP for example, there's this library: github.com/egulias/EmailValidator

Basically, since there are so many rules and edge cases about emails, creating a Regex to solve that problem is not a productive approach since if new edge cases are created or found, maintenance instantly becomes hell and the pattern most likely has to be recreated from scratch.

Fortunately, people have already poured tons of hours into solving that problem for us and we can build on their shoulders.

Another example where regex looks like an appropriate tool but isn't is with parsing HTML. It sprung a famous Stack overflow question answer.

Thread Thread
 
geongeorge profile image
Geon George

I just launched iHateRegex on Producthunt 😺

👉👉
producthunt.com/posts/i-hate-regex