[igivanov]

>time and effort might be key here for your mastery of this subject.

It doesn't have to be this way. If most programming languages were designed like regular expressions they would be unusable. I can spend a year w/o writing a single line of Pascal or C++ and then it would come back immediately. I occasionally found regular expressions useful in my work, but only a couple of times could justify spending time on learning a little bit of it only to forget the next day. In a few other cases I simply googled a solution and used w/o understanding it. Most often I just write code instead, it is verbose but at least it's clear what it does.

[hackbinary]

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that from personal and anecdotal experience I got 97% in a first year calculus course. I went in with a marginally good algebra result, but I resolved to learn the shit out of everything that came my way.

I systemised as much as I could, but there was a lot of write practice when it came to learning trigonomic idendities and transidnetal functions. And not just the normal ones; I mean all of them ... both the inverserse and hyperbolic identities.

I did all of the problems and got extra ones.

In short, I knew the material backwards and forwards; I finished hour long exams in 20 minutes, and was usually the first or second person to leave.

What I am trying to say is that REGEX is similar to calculas and in my view requires significant focus and practice to master. Or you can muddle your way through it when you have to.