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> I've never come across one in my decades of programming that I know of, but I'm sure they exist. The login attempt example was convoluted, so here are more c
by BoppreH 3y ago
> I've never come across one in my decades of programming that I know of, but I'm sure they exist.
The login attempt example was convoluted, so here are more common scenarios:
- Grouping a list into pairs by matching /../
- Finding or collapsing repeated sequences with /(.)\1+/
- Parsing tag+value binary formats.
- Searching structured logs.
- DSL's for unit tests.
Are there better ways to do each of those? Yes, but either because someone implemented those specific functions, or it's a much longer solution.
Though I'm not recommending list-regexes for production code anytime soon. Prototypes and code golfing, sure, but not until the community understands it better.
- burntsushi 3y agoYeah I just wouldn't make use of regexes with arbitrary alphabets for any of those tasks personally. Doesn't really seem like a win to me. But like I said, someone should go build it.
- nerdponx 3y agoOne of the uses I had was for identifying particular subsequences of events in a long sequence. I actually at one point considered translating the sequence of events into a string of distinct Unicode code points, so I could define and match patterns as regular expressions!