[spiderfarmer]

I never understood why people who understand regex don’t understand people who don’t understand regex. Obviously you are not the worst of all, but it’s not that hard to imagine how a regex looks to someone who doesn’t know regex, is it?

[luckylion]

I couldn't agree more. I know regex fairly well and parsing regex is still annoying and takes a lot more concentration than just reading normal code.

Plus there are so many cases where people build insane regex where they are just the wrong tool for the job, e.g. parsing/extracting or manipulating HTML. It always starts out with "I just need the src from that <img>, what could go wrong" and ends in despair, because you never just need that src and you never only deal with perfect html and you'd be done already if you had just used some dom parser.

[SXX]

Yeah, I get that regular expressions might look complex and tangled like brainfuck looks for me since I never tried to learn it. Yet I just see comments on how regular expressions are hard to understand from all kind of IT people who solving hundred times more complex puzzles every day. I guess it's just reputation that stick to certain technology and really have nothing to do with actual complexity.

[hatch_q]

Experience i guess. I've spent hundreds of hours on debugging and fixing regexes that other people wrote - usually just to find there's a quirk in certain regex parser implementation.

Regexes are easy to understand if you write them, but reading them can take lots of time.