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Although this might not be applicable given the topic, someone might as well say it: > Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use reg
by mlLK 17y ago
Although this might not be applicable given the topic, someone might as well say it:
> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. --Jamie Zawinski
As a sort of 'untold' rule of thumb, I avoid writing regex scripts like the plague and let my macros do all the globbing. Although I'm sure writing stuff in bash or C on a regular basis would trump this rule altogether, but, then again, I also avoid writing/reading anything in bash or C like the plague as well. sighs
- fragmede 17y agoThe original quote is: “If you have a problem and you think awk(1) is the solution, then you have two problems.” -David Tilbrook (http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247 http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247)
- icefox 17y agoWhat if my only other choice was sed or perl?
- Hexstream 17y agoWell, there are problems for which regular expressions are a perfect solution. The problem is when you try to do something like use regular expressions to match HTML. If you know the least bit of formal grammar theory, you'll know how maladapted that is.
- baddox 17y agoTo be fair, regexes can still be used when parsing a CFG.
- mlLK 17y agoTo be less fair, it can also be used to parse some strictly written XHTML.
- baddox 17y agoReally? XML tags seem to me to be essentially balanced parentheses.
- mock 17y agoIn perl you can use http://search.cpan.org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2010010201/lib/Regexp/Common/balanced.pm http://search.cpan.org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2010010201/lib... The entire Regexp::Common namespace is basically a cookbook of the "right" way to use regular expressions. Worth stealing and porting to other languages...
- MattJ100 17y ago(I shan't confess this is partly an excercise to see how deep HN will nest comments) Lua is interesting in that instead of using traditional regex it comes with its own "pattern" matching - the implementation is much cleaner than most regex implementations. See http://www.lua.org/pil/20.1.html http://www.lua.org/pil/20.1.html for a bit more info. I reply to this comment because Lua patterns actually have an operator to match balanced parentheses (or any pair of characters): %b() Also worth a look if you're feeling bored of regex are PEGs, which leads me nicely onto: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html (and finally yes, everything I do or speak about does tend to revolve around Lua)