Hacker Read top | best | new | newcomments | leaders | about | bookmarklet login

Agree. Regex literacy is a big skill to have too.


sort by: page size:

Completely agreed. Just a very basic understanding of regex has saved me a very significant amount of time throughout my entire ~8 year career. I’d say it’s one of the fundamental skillsets that I’ve leaned on consistently. This post just gives me “it looks scary therefore it’s awful” vibes.

Not me, but my boss knows regex and I probably should too as he is a wizard with it.

Agreed. Went through it twice and that combined with a bit of real-world practice made me pretty proficient at RegEx.

Fantastic site.


Now, this is the time to learn Regex the proper way.

A little regex skill goes a long way. A little bit more goes even longer than expected. And you can count on regex being a thing years from now.

Learning the ins and outs of regex is well worth it. I find myself doing regex search/replace almost daily within textmate.

I was excellent at regex early in my career... actually had a job where that's basically all I did for 9 months. Read the O'Reilly book Mastering Regular Expressions from cover to cover and referenced it multiple times per day. Doing regex at a high level was instinctual.

Lost much of that knowledge within a couple years after leaving that job... was shocked how much wasn't retained when I stumbled into another project that required a fair bit of regex work. There was some muscle memory involved and I was able to ramp up quickly, but now 20 years after that initial job I'm just like you.


Very cool! I think most of us would admit we spend more time than we'd like on regex.

Definitely agree that getting good at Regex over the years and more recently AWK/SED has helped me significantly.

I love regexes. In addition to doing cool things and saving time, I feel like I'm a "real programmer" whenever I write a good one.

I'd add a working knowledge of regex to that. With a decent text editor + some fairly basic regex skills you can go a long way.

Aye. I thought of myself as a regex wizard, and had answered many regex questions on perlmonks.org, but even then did I learn a lot about regexes while reading that book.

This is really neat! I've been putting off learning regex's for some time now, guess I need to add it to my tool belt.

RegEx 15 minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.

> regex is so ubiquitous and valuable that if you don’t know it yet, you should learn it)

Regex is one of those things I have to learn every single time I need to use it. I just can't seem to force myself to remember.


Indeed that is a useful little skill to have.

I am looking for skills at a somewhat higher level than regular expressions though. For instance, like some of those mentioned in the question above.


This is wonderful. I love to see technology enhancing experts' ability to do what they already do, but faster/more accurately.

Also, I'm a big fan of regex. I think -- probably thanks to jwz's famous quote -- a lot of younger programmers avoid them but they're fantastic for MATCHING. Using them in a Google sheet is a killer MVP to prove out something like this.


Most programmers I've met are not in fact regex "literate". They may be able to write one, but understanding what one does, or even modifying it? Well... So yeah, black box.

And if there's anyone here who doesn't know regex - go and learn regex. It will take 30 minutes max and the investment in time and brain space will pay off countless times.
next

Legal | privacy