My RegExp nightmare

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? 😐

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

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.

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

What do you use in place of regex?

[Meghan (she/her)]

You can implement a replaceAll function for Strings just using the built-in replace and regex:

String.prototype.replaceAll = function(search, replacement) {
    return this.replace(new RegExp(search, 'g'), replacement);
}

[Meghan (she/her)]

Not alone for sure. I don’t see anything “regular” in regular expressions and getting one that works can be very tough indeed. And don’t even get me started on flags haha

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

😂😂😂

[Periklis Gkolias]

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

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

APIs, I'll research more on that.

[Michiel Hendriks]

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?

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

Thanks for the blog post link. Gives some useful tips on how to deal with this monster

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

Do you watch the silicon valley series? I'm asking because of your last name. Hendriks

[Michiel Hendriks]

Yes I do watch it. We're not related, I for one actually exist :p

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

lol. But you can try and build the "new internet".

[J. Pichardo]

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 ;)

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

The importance and usefulness of regular expressions cannot be stressed enough. However, writing them can be daunting.

[J. Pichardo]

I find daunting to be fun. 😝

[Théo]

I love to write regular expressions, unfortunately I don't have enough occasions to use them in web development aside from form validation...

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

Yeah, I also mostly use it for validation.

[Abdul Qadir Luqman]

You must really be in love with regex

[Uladzislau Murashka]

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 :)

[MN Mark]

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.

[Jan Wedel]

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.