[saberworks]

This looks really nice but I think it suffers from the same issue a lot of regex tutorials suffer from. It's focusing solely on the regex and not at all on how to actually execute them. This site in particular says it's going to use javascript but at least the first few pages don't show anything except raw regular expressions.

For any tutorial about regular expressions I think the second thing (beyond a very simple example regex) to show should be how to actually execute one in code. Is it that all the tutorials want to be language-agnostic? Maybe just show a javascript example and point out which part is the js function/method call and which part is the actual regex.

It's nice to be told what /[aeiou]/ means but without actually typing it in and executing it (against various inputs, not just one) it wouldn't really sink in for me.

[thedirt0115]

I agree that it would be nice if the learner was given some instruction on how to experiment right away. I'd recommend https://regex101.com/ as a tool to complement this (or any) regex tutorial, as well as when you're crafting/debugging regex. It's language-agnostic in that you don't need to write any code, just the regex and input -- but you can still pick different regex flavors like PCRE vs JavaScript.

[jehlakj]

Good. Unless you’re trying to write a one off script, you shouldn’t manually use them in real world projects. They’re a big source of bugs

[ben509]

Every compiler and interpreter as well as all text formats like HTML, XML, JSON, etc. have a lexing pass that uses manually crafted regular expressions. Those are real world projects.

The defensible form of this argument is that one should prefer a serialization library or a properly normalized database rather than trying to "stringly type" data and then pull it out via regexes.

[yoz-y]

I've read this a lot but I've yet to encounter bugs in regexes that wouldn't be otherwise encountered in a parser or validator that uses other techniques. Code is just code.

[wasureru]

“Unless you’re trying to write a one off script, you shouldn’t manually use them in real world projects.”

What should one use instead of manual use?