Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
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Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#2Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#3While useful to some I think advanced RE are like mixing in Perl or playing code golf with production code. They tend to make code harder to read.
My preference in such cases is for multiple separated or longer REs (which can be at least split in the surrounding code) and each part named or heavily commented. Of course it's always worthwhile to consider non-RE solutions if the problem can be broken down enough.
EDIT: Fixed typo
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#4Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.
I love them and I think I'm great with them. (Though I'm probably not as great at them as a bunch of you reading this comment)
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#5Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.
They're definitely useful, and I can cobble them together to get lots of otherwise tedious and complex parsing tasks done, but when I come back to them a week later I have no idea what the hell the pile of wingding vomit I wrote was supposed to do.
I find myself writing simpler ones and tying them together with app code just for sanity's sake.
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#6While useful to some I think advanced RE are like mixing in Perl or playing code golf with production code. They tend to make code harder to read. My preference in such cases is for multiple separated or longer REs (which can be at least split in the surrounding code) and each part named or heavily commented. Of course it's always worthwhile to consider non-RE solutions if the problem can be broken down enough. EDIT:…
Fair enough, but I really think the benefits of advanced regular expressions are underappreciated in non-production and even non-application contexts. Laypeople (and occasionally even developers) are impressed when you show them how to search through a document or file system using a really complicated pattern, where it would have taken several iterations of data manipulation to achieve the same result without using advanced regular expressions.
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#7Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.
A programmer saying they are terrible at regex is like a mathematician saying they are terrible at algebra.
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#8Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.
I think everyone who doesn't know regex should make learning regex a priority. (However, I find that lookahead and lookbehind in particular do not tend to come in handy very often. So maybe just make a mental note that this exists and then look it up when you need it.) Just learn the basics and maybe take a very quick look at the theory, finite automata (maybe the name puts people off, but its just a couple of circles connected to other circles with a bunch of characters written on the connecting lines. I'm pretty sure you could explain it all in a few sentences a few examples). You'll get an intuitive feeling for what you can and can't do with regular expressions.
You don't even have to be able to code to make use of regular expressions. You can use regular expressions when searching and replacing in editors (even slightly barebones editors like gedit or kate). You can transform input data from almost any format into any other format using nothing but your editor and a series of replace statements. (No computations though.)
I think they should teach regex in high school. Many people working in non-IT office jobs could benefit from knowing regex, and I think it's really quick to learn this. (Now if only Excel's/Word's search/replace supported regex...)
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#9Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.
A programmer saying they are terrible at regex is like a mathematician saying they are terrible at algebra.
Mobile programmers doesn’t need regex nearly as much as serverside
Re: Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
#10That is truly bizarre... I went looking for info on lookaheads just today, and found myself on that very site, and now it's on HN. It's just that ol' HN magic I guess.