5 ms·
Ask HN: Why isn't there a widely accepted replacement for regular expressions?
They're notoriously difficult to understand, and there have been lots of attempts to support alternatives that are more human readable (these examples include alternatives and Regex wrappers):
* https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions
* https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse
* https://drup.github.io/2016/08/12/tyre/
- stephenr 10y agoThey can be difficult to understand, particularly for inexperienced users. That's more an indicator that the person should learn about regular expressions than anything.
- PaulHoule 10y agoI think most people find them easy to understand compared to the alternative of writing the code as a state machine or writing it without using a state machine.
- voodoochilo 10y agoblame it on chomsky