The core criticism of regular expressions is legitimately directed at intermediate programmers who know enough to be dangerous, but is sometimes inappropriately

The core criticism of regular expressions is legitimately directed at intermediate programmers who know enough to be dangerous, but is sometimes inappropriately cargo-culted by beginner programmers who use it as an excuse not to learn regular expressions. The fact is that despite pithy slogans, there is a sweet spot where a regular expression does the job of matching a string in a clearer fashion than anything else. But that sweet spot is well shy of the theoretical power of regular expressions (especially in Perl!), before which you should further your understanding of a range of parsing techniques before hacking together a baroque regex.