Regex as a language kind of sucks. If you don't use it on a daily basis, it's pretty easy to let your understandability of it slip to the point where the averag

Regex as a language kind of sucks. If you don't use it on a daily basis, it's pretty easy to let your understandability of it slip to the point where the average regex looks like symbol soup. At the cost of terseness, I think representing regexes as a chain of operations would be much more practical. I've seen at least one library do this on HN probably a couple years back, and it was roundly derided in the comments. But failing adoption of such a library, there's not a whole lot of excuse for a professional programmer not to be able to look up some syntax to whip up a regex in cases where it's the right tool for the job.