If the language you're trying to parse happens to be regular, then regular expressions are the perfect tool for the job. They're simple, reliable, and impossib

If the language you're trying to parse happens to be regular, then regular expressions are the perfect tool for the job. They're simple, reliable, and impossibly fast. When you think about it, a search engine is mainly about finding key words in a huge pile of text, without caring much about the structure of the language the text is written in. That use case is totally specifiable by a regular language.