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I'm really surprised by the low quantity of people who learned by trying and instead read whole books or manuals. Had some code or whatnot that needed mass-repl

by pluc 2y ago

I'm really surprised by the low quantity of people who learned by trying and instead read whole books or manuals. Had some code or whatnot that needed mass-replacing and used the built-in RegEx find-and-replace (I think it was EditPlus in those days). First learned how to match the exact string then extrapolate from there using {}, (), replacing, etc. It's a lot easier to learn when you need to solve a practical, immediate problem.

idontwantthis 2y ago
Yeah this is wild to me, maybe it’s a generational thing? I never “learned” regex. I’ve written hundreds of them but I figured out what I needed and then I moved on.
Someone 2y ago
I agree you don’t need “whole books or manuals”, but how do you learn by trying alone? The search space is enormous, and even if you stumble on a code fragment that appears to work, how do you know your code actually does what you think it does, and how do you know there isn’t a more efficient or readable way to do what you want to do? Case in point, you wrote: > then extrapolate from there using {}, (), replacing, etc. How did you find out about those, if not from reading (likely followed by some trying to check your understanding)? I think you have to read, not “whole books”, but ‘just’ the right documentation, where ‘right’ depends on the tool you use. For example man regex may be sufficient. That, you can read in a few minutes.
conductr 2y ago
That's how I learned. I'm a self taught dev so I pretty much just took the same approach. Read documentation, try it out, read more docs, try it out, read some examples, search for how other people do it, etc. At a certain point, you just know it and can solve 90% of your needs without looking at docs. Although, tbh, I haven't written a very complicated regex in probably a decade and would need to do some warm up reps if I needed to today.

by pluc 2y ago

idontwantthis 2y ago

Yeah this is wild to me, maybe it’s a generational thing? I never “learned” regex. I’ve written hundreds of them but I figured out what I needed and then I moved on.

Someone 2y ago

I agree you don’t need “whole books or manuals”, but how do you learn by trying alone? The search space is enormous, and even if you stumble on a code fragment that appears to work, how do you know your code actually does what you think it does, and how do you know there isn’t a more efficient or readable way to do what you want to do? Case in point, you wrote: > then extrapolate from there using {}, (), replacing, etc. How did you find out about those, if not from reading (likely followed by some trying to check your understanding)? I think you have to read, not “whole books”, but ‘just’ the right documentation, where ‘right’ depends on the tool you use. For example man regex may be sufficient. That, you can read in a few minutes.

conductr 2y ago

That's how I learned. I'm a self taught dev so I pretty much just took the same approach. Read documentation, try it out, read more docs, try it out, read some examples, search for how other people do it, etc. At a certain point, you just know it and can solve 90% of your needs without looking at docs. Although, tbh, I haven't written a very complicated regex in probably a decade and would need to do some warm up reps if I needed to today.