I found regexes pretty baffling (i.e., took me a long time to understand at all) when I first encountered them. And, even now, complicated regular expressions c

I found regexes pretty baffling (i.e., took me a long time to understand at all) when I first encountered them. And, even now, complicated regular expressions can be difficult to work on. The main challenge is that you can't see which part of some huge pattern isn't matching, or insert a breakpoint / printf in the middle, it's just an opaque black box that either works or doesn't... and if it doesn't you need to break it all the way down to something that does, then work back up again from there.