Why are regular expressions such a complicated, cryptic mess?
- by steffenj
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.