regular expressions: love or hate or alternatives?
- by yamspog
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?