5 ms·

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." Jamie Zawinski 1997.

• 83457 17y ago
  No one should ever use regular expressions because there is a cute quote that says not too.
  • fmota 17y ago
    Also, because regular expressions are not the right tool for the job sometimes. ("No one should ever use regular expressions" is hyperbolic and wrong.)
  • jmount 17y ago
    The problem is that regular expressions (in addition not being powerful enough to properly handle HTML) are a bit of a maintenance headache. They look like line noise. Most regular expressions don't change properly with local (did you use \w, [a-zA-Z] or \p{Alpha} and which of these did you really mean). And you can't always be sure the regexp is implemented efficiently (by compiling a finite automata instead of search, see http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html ). Often a parser generator (of which a lexer is often the first step, which is as powerful as regular expressions) is a much better solution.
• james2vegas 17y ago
  "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll quote Jamie Zawinski.' Now they have two problems."