I completely agree. Honestly regular expressions are hard to get a handle on anyway. I've done software development for about 12 years now and I probably run in

I completely agree. Honestly regular expressions are hard to get a handle on anyway. I've done software development for about 12 years now and I probably run into a regular expression pretty regularly and I still find them hard to read and understand. Almost every single time they do things that can easily be accomplished with a loop and a tiny bit of string manipulation and, honestly, even if the regex was a little faster it's unlikely to be so much faster than you need to make the micro-optimization of using regex instead of some looping. I try to avoid regex where possible and in the event that I do need to use it I try to document it the best I can and to make sure it's as simple as possible to avoid weird issues like this.