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.
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.
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 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.
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