5 ms·
The fact there are countless RegEx cheatsheets and pages like https://regex101.com/ https://regex101.com/ or https://regexr.com/ https://regexr.com/ is evidence
by hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
The fact there are countless RegEx cheatsheets and pages like https://regex101.com/ https://regex101.com/ or https://regexr.com/ https://regexr.com/ is evidence RegExes are not intuitive or easy to remember. Composing plain-english functions can be easier to remember, and editors can provide auto-complete.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoThe argument isn’t that they’re easy to use, it’s that they’re widely used and widely available in virtually all languages. You’ll encounter them. The time it takes to learn regular expressions will pay off because you’ll be reading them and writing them for your whole career.
- king_magic 6y agoEh, not necessarily. 15 years into my career, I can count the number of times I've needed regular expressions on two fingers.
- setr 6y agoExcept that all implementations are subtly and annoyingly different, and while you can transfer your general understanding, you can’t avoid the cheatsheet if you’re using multiple tools. But of course, since this is basically a one-to-one mapping, you can also trivially transfer your understanding to any other regex tool anyways (with a cheatsheet, which you’ll need in either case).
- djeiasbsbo 6y agoI'd say the bigger issue are the different regex implementations. If you use Java, Javascript and grep you already have to know the peculiarities of each implementation...
- flatiron 6y agoIntelliJ at least has a built in regex maker that you can test against strings in the IDE. Pretty close to auto complete.
- pwdisswordfish4 6y agoIt’s only evidence that they have to be learned, like everything else.