Are regexes really maintainable?

Posted by Rich Bradshaw on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Rich Bradshaw
Published on 2008-09-29T21:27:42Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 11:13 UTC
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best-practices

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regex

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coding-style

Any code I've seen that uses Regexes tends to use them as a black box:

Put in string
Magic Regex
Get out string

This doesn't seem a particularly good idea to use in production code, as even a small change can often result in a completely different regex.

Apart from cases where the standard is permanent and unchanging, are regexes the way to do things, or is it better to try different methods?

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