The worst regexes I've had to write involved parsing the various IMDB data files, which seem to have been formatted specifically to make them as difficult to parse as possible. I hear mediawiki syntax is similarly arcane and evil, but I've never tried to parse it (though last night I started writing some tools to deal with wikipedia dumps so I might end up in that corner). I'd really like to see different approaches to parsing really ugly formats that feature an exception to almost every single pattern you think you've found. I honestly think the regex is easiest...
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The worst regexes I've had to write involved parsing the various IMDB data files, which seem to have been formatted specifically to make them as difficult to parse as possible. I hear mediawiki syntax is similarly arcane and evil, but I've never tried to parse it (though last night I started writing some tools to deal with wikipedia dumps so I might end up in that corner). I'd really like to see different approaches to parsing really ugly formats that feature an exception to almost every single pattern you think you've found. I honestly think the regex is easiest...