I seriously find regular expressions a boring area in programming. I sometimes think people who write good regular expressions have some kind of super powers. Am I alone here? 😐
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Yes we do have super powers. However, you do not have to get bitten by a radio active spider. Start small, and grow into larger expressions.
But, regex are no substitute to writing a proper parser. It is basically a rather powerful kludge.
Would you like to know more?
Do you watch the silicon valley series? I'm asking because of your last name. Hendriks
Yes I do watch it. We're not related, I for one actually exist :p
lol. But you can try and build the "new internet".
Thanks for the blog post link. Gives some useful tips on how to deal with this monster
Not alone. I rarely turn to Regex unless it's the absolute obvious choice or it's the existing pattern in the code I'm modifying (and even then, sometimes there's a reason to remove it).
That being said, regex can be the underlying implementation of friendlier interfaces.
What do you use in place of regex?
You can implement a
replaceAllfunction forStrings just using the built-inreplaceand regex:You are not alone, at all, however, I have found regular expressions to be incredibly powerful and extremely useful, it is always a good thing to know, or at least understand.
p.s. We do have super powers ;)
The importance and usefulness of regular expressions cannot be stressed enough. However, writing them can be daunting.
I find daunting to be fun. 😝
You're certainly not alone.
I actually do really enjoy regular expressions. It's one of the few things I can mentally dive into and not "come up for air" for hours. However, based on the developers I've met, I am in a very small minority.
Hey, for better understanding and possibly more interesting learning process you can try such service like regexone.com/
This service helps you learn regular expressions with interesting tasks which you can solve by multiple ways :)
I find them useful and powerful. Maybe I have a superpower...
The way I approach a problem with regular expressions is to break it down into smaller parts, then build on what I have. Let's say I wanted to write a morse code parser. I would probably first try to validate that the input is valid morse code, so I start with a few strings that are valid, and a few that are not. I try my test strings against the regex I think will validate, and see if it works. Then I try replacing the letter E. I make sure that works. Then the letter T... I make sure my "._" doesn't get turned into "ET". Then I build on it...
What I hate about regexs is that they are "write only". That is, if a piece of code has a regular expression in it, you pretty much have to treat it like a black box. If you have to change it to handle a different case (you want to handle digits in your morse code translator) , you more or less have to recreate the regex from scratch. The current version is helpful for hints, but that's about it.
People who can look at a complicated regex and tell you what it does and what cases pass/dont are worthy of great admiration.
In my opinion, Regex is life-saving. For example This simple web scrapping job using regex at line 49. It save lot of loops.
I remember feeling the same way when I was learning Perl - I was tempted to skip over the chapter on regexes, thinking I wouldn't use them. I didn't give in to that temptation; I buckled down and learned them.
And I am so glad I did!
I tend not to use regexes in long-lived code, but I use them all the time on the command line for adhoc data processing. I use them with perl oneliners to extract data, ack to search codebases, among other things. On top of this, I use patterns in Vim (Vim's own little regex dialect).
My advice would be to learn the basics - regexes are a really powerful tool to have in your toolbox!
I love it. Usually I use in an text editor to create or modify large amounts of text. Sometimes I create sequences in Excel (yep, Excel) and then apply RegExes to it to build some JSON out of it. I rarely use it in production code, because readability and maintainability is much more important than short code.
Just today, we refactored a 3 line regEx to about 100 lines of code which is longer but much more comprehensible.
I tend to avoid them. Not because I dont understand them(I believe I am above average there), but because I find them easy to lead me to dirty errors.
Usually there is a better alternative around the API of the language.
so give it a hard try but dont take it personally
APIs, I'll research more on that.