4 ms·
I was hoping for a visual editor or something similar when I read the title. Regular expressions are not hard to understand (once you understood finite state m
by lignuist 14y ago
I was hoping for a visual editor or something similar when I read the title.
Regular expressions are not hard to understand (once you understood finite state machines), but the syntax is hard to read in many cases.
- pmccool 14y agoQuite right. I see two issues with regexes: funky syntax and some important and non-obvious limitations. If you want to use them, these two things add up to a considerable barrier to entry. There are many examples of trivial pattern-matching languages (DOS wildcards, UNIX wildcards and SQL text matching to name but three) that address both of these issues by being easy to grasp and surprisingly useful. I haven't actually tried this, but it seems easy to grasp and I've spent enough time busting up delimited strings that "surprisingly useful" is plausible too.