The core criticism of regular expressions is legitimately directed at intermediate programmers who know enough to be dangerous, but is sometimes inappropriately cargo-culted by beginner programmers who use it as an excuse not to learn regular expressions.
The fact is that despite pithy slogans, there is a sweet spot where a regular expression does the job of matching a string in a clearer fashion than anything else. But that sweet spot is well shy of the theoretical power of regular expressions (especially in Perl!), before which you should further your understanding of a range of parsing techniques before hacking together a baroque regex.
Though there's nothing wrong with busting out a baroque regex in one time use contexts (editor's search function, throw-away application of grep or sed, &c).
Comments
The core criticism of regular expressions is legitimately directed at intermediate programmers who know enough to be dangerous, but is sometimes inappropriately cargo-culted by beginner programmers who use it as an excuse not to learn regular expressions.
The fact is that despite pithy slogans, there is a sweet spot where a regular expression does the job of matching a string in a clearer fashion than anything else. But that sweet spot is well shy of the theoretical power of regular expressions (especially in Perl!), before which you should further your understanding of a range of parsing techniques before hacking together a baroque regex.
Though there's nothing wrong with busting out a baroque regex in one time use contexts (editor's search function, throw-away application of grep or sed, &c).
Of course not.
As with many things, I find the sweet spot changes depending on my knowledge and familiarity with the concept.