regular expressions: love or hate or alternatives?

Posted by yamspog on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by yamspog
Published on 2010-05-06T05:52:28Z Indexed on 2010/05/06 5:58 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 318

Filed under:

regular-expressions

|

regex

|

subjective

|

discussion

While I can see the value and usefulness of regular expressions, I also find that they are extremely complicated and difficult to create and debug. I am often at the point where I find their usefulness is offset by the difficulty in creating expressions.

I am a bit astonished by the fact that there is nothing quite like them and that there hasn't been an effort to recreate them use a more verbose or less arcane syntax.

so, are regular expressions here to stay? are there alternatives that are gaining traction? do other people just ignore them and write hundreds of lines of string compare functions?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about regular-expressions

If you had to reinvent a new syntax for regular expressions, what would it look like?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
Regular expressions as they are today are pretty much as concise and compact as they can be. Consequently, they are often criticised for being unreadable and hard to debug. If you had to reinvent a new syntax for regular expressions, what would it look like? Do you prefer the concise syntax they… >>> More
Regular Expressions Cookbook Is in The Money—Win a Copy

as seen on Regular-Expressions.info - Search for 'Regular-Expressions.info'
Regular Expressions Cookbook has sold enough copies to pay for the advance royalty Steven and I received. To celebrate we're giving away five copies of the book. >>> More
Looking for good Regex book

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I've been trying to get a good grounding with Regular Expressions, and am looking for a single book to do so. I've been going through Amazon.com's listings on this subject, and I've identified a few possibilities, but am unsure which would be best for a C# developer who can write very simple Regexs… >>> More
Regular Expressions Tutorials

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does anyone know of a regular expression tutorial that doesn't use a designer? >>> More
read a text field in Python using regular expressions

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have text file, like FILED AS OF DATE: 20090209 DATE AS OF CHANGE: 20090209 I need to find the position using FILED AS OF DATE: and read the date. I know how to do it using python strings. But using a regular expression seems cooler:) Btw, how to parse the date? Thanks! >>> More

Related posts about regex

Find multiple regex in each line and skip result if one of the regex doesn't match

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a list of variables: variables = ['VariableA', 'VariableB','VariableC'] which I'm going to search for, line by line ifile = open("temp.txt",'r') d = {} match = zeros(len(variables)) for line in ifile: emptyCells=0 for i in range(len(variables)): regex = r'('+variables[i]+r')[:|=|\(](-… >>> More
OWASP Regex Repository: Is this regex correct?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I was looking at the regular expression for validating various data types from the (OWASP Regex Repository). One of the regular expressions in there is called safetext and looks like: ^[a-zA-Z0-9\s.\-]+$ My first question is: Is this regular expression correct? complementary question If this… >>> More
Make a Perl-style regex interpreter behave like a basic or extended regex interpreter

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am writing a tool to help students learn regular expressions. I will probably be writing it in Java. The idea is this: the student types in a regular expression and the tool shows which parts of a text will get matched by the regex. Simple enough. But I want to support several different regex… >>> More
JS regex isn't matching, even thought it works with a regex tester

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm writing a piece of client-side javascript code that takes a function and finds the derivative of it, however, the regex that's supposed to match with the power rule fails to work in the context of the javascript program, even though it sucessfully matches when it's used with an independent regex… >>> More
c# RegEx with "|"

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I need to be able to check for a pattern with | in them. For example an expression like d*|*t should return true for a string like "dtest|test". I'm no regex hero so I just tried a couple of things, like: Regex Pattern = new Regex("s*\|*d"); //unable to build because of single backslash Regex Pattern… >>> More