Why are regular expressions such a complicated, cryptic mess?

Posted by steffenj on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by steffenj
Published on 2008-11-04T19:28:02Z Indexed on 2010/04/22 13:43 UTC
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regex

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subjective

Often when I see regular expressions, I only see a total mess of characters. Why does it have to be this way?

I guess what I really want to know is: are there alternatives to regular expressions that basically do the same thing but are implemented in a human readable language?

[UPDATE]

Thanks for all the great responses and inspiration!

I wanted to highlight this particular link which shows how a (working) alternative would look like, which may also be a good starting point for learning or "simple" regex expressions. But you also quickly get a feel for the verbosity tradeoff.

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