4 ms·
Regular expressions fall into this category. While they might take longer to master, you should know the basics after an hour. I've been surprised at how ofte
by aeternum 7y ago
Regular expressions fall into this category. While they might take longer to master, you should know the basics after an hour.
I've been surprised at how often people convert long lists line-by-line. You can sometimes take what was a multiple-hour task and complete it with a handful of cryptic characters.
- agungsukma 7y agoYes, regular expression. Saves me from lines of substr, split, join, etc.
- enraged_camel 7y agoEh, I always use substr, split and so on if possible. They make the code way easier to read than with a regex.
- Izkata 7y agoIt really depends on what you're doing, and at least being aware of what regex can do will help with deciding which is better for a given situation. For example, I remember once replacing a buggy 3-4 lines of python based on split/etc with a single regex: match all \d+ (it was for extracting IDs from a user-input string)
- aliceryhl 7y agoSimple transformations can easily become complex to do with regex, so I've started using vim macros instead.
- swiley 7y agoRegex don’t do transformations? All they can do is match strings.
- TJSomething 7y agoTransformation by substitution is part of most dialects of regex, in the form of capturing groups.
- aeternum 7y agoRegex grouping expressions along with find & replace enable transformations.
- leokennis 7y agoIf I have a list of names I’d like to reverse: John Smith > Smith, John Anna Peterson > Peterson, Anna I can write: (.) (.) And replace with: \2, \1 Not sure if that’s part of some “official” regex spec but it works more or less everywhere. (Of course if it was an actual list of names I’d have to be a lot more intelligent with double names etc.)
- jeltz 7y agoAlmost. All regular expressions do is match strings and find the starts and ends of whole matches and match groups. And this is an important distinction since match group support adds quite a bit of complexity to the theory behind regular expressions and also increases their usefulness by quite a bit. Regular expression libraries then often can use these boundaries, for the whole match and for groups, for transform the string (e.g. replacing what was matched by a group with some other content).
- sauravs 7y agoagree...regular expression is like magic to me
- maccard 7y agoI spent an hour learning the basics - wildcards, whitespace, escape symbols and Character ranges are enough for them to be useful.
- smbl64 7y agoThis always helps me in learning and debugging regex: https://regex101.com/ https://regex101.com/
- jeltz 7y agoCan you really learn regex in one hour? I learned them so long time ago and in a gradual way that I have no idea how long it would take if you focus on it, but I feel like it would be more than an hour since I think most people would need to play around quite a bit to really grasp them.
- collyw 7y agoThere is a way of thinking when you deal with regexes that took me a while to get. Reading the first chapter of ORiley's Mastering Regular Expressions was what made me get it and that was maybe an hours worth of time.
- johnlbevan2 7y agoI found this site fantastic for improving my RegEx skills - https://regexcrossword.com/ https://regexcrossword.com/. Most people find solving puzzles more fun than reading text books, and the hands-on experience / forcing you to think rather than just read, can really help things stick in your memory.
- danhanlon 7y agoHaven't done the Regex course, but Gary Bernhardt's https://www.executeprogram.com https://www.executeprogram.com looks promising and haven't seen it mentioned