Regex... Love it or Leave Programming
I love regular expressions, but I may be one of the few developers who doesn't have a hate/hate relationship with them. Some guy once said,
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
Personally, I think that guy is... Well, just look at his homepage and you'll figure it out.
My answer to people who hold this opinion (whether they are joking or super-cereal) is that regex is the language of parsing text. There are other ways to parse text, but they suck in comparison. Stop being lazy and learn it.
Still not in agreement? Let me put it another way,
Some people, when confronted with relational data, think "I know, I'll use SQL." Now they have two problems.
If you have the requirement to deal with relational data in your application, you'd better know SQL. SQL is the language of parsing relational data. Yes, there are other ways to parse and handle relational data. There is nothing to say that you can't scan through data tables in a sequential manner using procedural code, but it would suck in comparison.
That's not to say Regex or SQL is easy. But good things rarely are easy, and powerful things never are. With the right tools you can make them easier.
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