Probably worth revisiting this bit of commentary from Rob Pike: "Regular expressions are hard to write, hard to write well, and can be expensive relative to ot

Probably worth revisiting this bit of commentary from Rob Pike: "Regular expressions are hard to write, hard to write well, and can be expensive relative to other technologies... Standard lexing and parsing techniques are so easy to write, so general, and so adaptable there's no reason to use regular expressions. "Another way to look at it is that lexers and parsing are matching statically-defined patterns, but regular expressions' strength is that they provide a way to express patterns dynamically. They're great in text editors and search tools, but when you know at compile time whatall the things are you're looking for, regular expressions bring far more generality and flexibility than you need. "Encouraging regular expressions as a panacea for all text processing problems is not only lazy and poor engineering, it also reinforces their use by people who shouldn't be using them at all." http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2011/08/regular-expressions-in-lexing-and.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2011/08/regular-expression... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2915137 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2915137 Personally, I think they're pretty darn useful and too powerful to not learn, but Pike's comment makes me think that maybe they're also a crutch that I've relied on too much rather than learning enough about lexing/parsing.