[the-pigeon]

I'm not sure how to explain it but the most important thing I've learned in over a decade of programming experience is to not use regular expressions for many things they may seem like a regular expression problem.

For example, even something as simple a phone number can have all sorts of weird but valid variants. Be sure you really need to even validate it's format and not just that it's present.

Trying to handle all of those variants via regex expression is doable but a pain. And in practice you as the programmer should not be defining those variants that are valid as it's up to the business itself to define what type of data it considers to be valid for the field.

That said I've also worked for companies with small engineering teams where the goal has always been to be as efficient with development time as possible, as opposed to making a near ideal system. Software has different needs when it's used by a thousand people than when it's used by millions.