In years of being a developer I never really spent the time to learn regular expressions. It always seemed like a hard nut to crack.
I used to spend so much time trying to find regular expressions for my use case.
now you have two problems
Enter iHateRegex.io
I made a simple tool that will explain to you commonly used regular expressions work.
It is a simple tool that will show a visual graph as well as matches and highlighting for code.
Hope you like the tool :D
Tech
Public Repo: https://github.com/geongeorge/i-hate-regex
The application is built using:
- The awesome Nuxt.js framework
- Tailwind.css
- for the visual demo I used: https://gitlab.com/javallone/regexper-static
Update
- Thank you for all the love and support guys 💓 Posting this has given me enough motivation to work on this more.
- The application is just an MVP right now. With the support of everyone, I can make this into a great project for beginners.
- I'm also working on tutorial pages to get started on regex. here's a sample
Producthunt launch
I just launched iHateRegex on Producthunt 😺
👉👉
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/i-hate-regex
Oldest comments (89)
Ooh i really liked your tool,why don't you make more like this?
Thanks brother.. i hate regex too..nice share for people like us
:D Haters assemble!
Where does all this hate for Regex come from?? I never thought it was complicated and learning it can be done within a few hours.
it comes from fear and lack of clarity.
Take the case of a simple expression to validate an email:
emailregex.com/
Why does it have to be this hard?
even if you check any stack overflow thread you'll find 100s of opinions.
stackoverflow.com/questions/46155/...
(read that again imagining you are a beginner)
Well simply put, Regex is not the right tool for validating email addresses and should be only used as feedback on the frontend of your app. If the patterns you're using get this complicated, it's probably a sign the thing you're using it for isn't the right task for the tool (and considering the amount of people in the comments of your website that are finding all sorts of edge cases, I think this is accurate).
Of course if you want to do things right, it often gets really tricky, but that's like showing the code base of a huge website as an example to someone who wants to learn a programming language, of course he's going to be overwhelmed and will feel defeated, but no one should start with the complicated stuff.
Regex at its core is fairly simple, but sadly, it's often overused and misused.
That was one of the main reasons why I started this idea. It's a simple cheat sheet for commonly used regular expressions.
Also, I don't really hate regex (hypocrite me 😂). The name is just a funny thing I came up with. I've seen a lot of hate for this online.
I hope the idea became clear when you opened the website. It's not a rant about how many people and I hate the thing.
PS: If you ask me the only email validation expression that I might ever use with regex is this: ihateregex.io/expr/email
I completely agree with the email one, that's also the one I went with in most of my projects. I convinced some teachers in the past that Regex is not the best tool for email validation and that we should use that pattern in frontend instead.
Also I figured you didn't actually hate the thing if you created a whole website about the thing 😂😝.
You've done a good job of explaining it, although some patterns (such as the IP one) could probably be simplified a bit.
I'll definitely forward your website if I see someone struggling. Great job!
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)
If your repo is public, I'd be glad to help with a PR or two! 😊
Here you go 😊:
github.com/geongeorge/i-hate-regex
The code is not the most elegant (I have to warn you)
Huh. I always do complex stuff like this with regex, in frontend as well as in backend.
What would be your tool of choice?
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.
I just launched iHateRegex on Producthunt 😺
👉👉
producthunt.com/posts/i-hate-regex
The problem with Regexes (especially the complex ones) is that they are really prone to errors so you have to write tons of tests to verify them. But who wants to write a million tests? We just copy and paste from stack-overflow or use a trusted library and pray for the best. That's why they have a bad reputation.
to point! I like it <3
for newbie, it too complicated. when write regex only for email and username, it cool. But when it going with complicated stuff. me also sometimes stuck with it and hate it. but at end of i like it...!! because i m also programmer. :D. i have no else option. :)
;) aren't we all
yeah..!!
Great thing that you came up with something this useful when a lot of people still hate all the complexities behind regex. So, does ihateregex help to generate regular expressions with a set of strings?
not in its current form. It just allows you to edit and play around already saved expressions
bookmarked
Thank you <3
🤩 This is awesome!
How can I contribute more builtin patterns?
Thank you <3 ! Right now there is a google form on the website.
You can also send a pr: github.com/geongeorge/i-hate-regex
Just add your regex to static/regexdata.json
(excuse the bad code. will slowly fix that :P)
according to your regex, this is a valid emailaddress: geon@ihate@regex.io
Any suggestion?
I have 2 email expressions in the app(try a search). Just use the simple one if you don't know what you want. It works 99% of all the time.
If you wanna get it 99.9% success rate use the complicated one (but please don't)
read the comment thread in this post by @hyftar and me
I see. Well, I just clicked "email" on the homepage and I landed on the simple email :-)
With the complicated email, I think you need to consider word boundaries, since you match a part theproblem@test@gmail.com , but it should be entirely right or entirely wrong.
I'm starting to see why you hate regex ;-)
😂 Yeah. I will spend some time to properly understand the email part
Thank you <3
Nice service, Regex works nicely on simple things.
Thanks for the link - you deserve at least a Github * for your efforts.
Github stars are much appreciated -^ Thank you
Love regex, it's honestly not so bad, go to regextester and write some tests, besides, regex can be used in any language 😍
Great tool, bookmarked! ⚡
Thank you <3 More features on the way
Really useful app ! Thanks ;)
You really did a great job at self-improvement here, even if it wasn't your intention at first! :)
Take a problem, solve it and overcome it.
What I like especially about your site is that you are greeted with a couple of popular choices and just a searchbox to get started. On other sites I always find myself getting lost in information like tips, setting options, understanding different flags and stuff that is visible right after loading the page.
The clean UI helps to stay focused on getting the regex and leaving again.
Thank you for the coffee and the feedback <3
I'm happy to see you liked it
The main problem with regex is that they overused.
For simple problems, regex are not needed, you have simpler, more readable solutions.
A combinaison of
split(),subString(),removePrefix(),removeSuffix()is usually enough.For complex problems, regex are not good at all.
Do not use a regex try to parse email, or URL, or HTML, ...
If the regex is not trivial, do not use a regex.
My advice:
Have a rule for pull requests that insists that every regex must come with a unit test that includes input that the regex is supposed to match and the ones that it's supposed to reject.
Will do <3
I agree about the part where people shove in regex where it's absolutely overkill.
I very agree with this!
I used to feel the same.
Then I actually learned how to use regex.
Now I think that non-regex solutions that use more than one function are better done with regex. Because 80% of the time you only need simple regex patterns.
(Almost) totally agree.
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