[richeyryan]

I once worked on a product where the idea was the end user would write a lot of custom regexes to parse the output of commands on network devices. The system was written in such a way that the regexes were nested and looped depending on the depth of the output. The overall result is you could read and update config on a device based on what output of these regexes.

It seemed bizarre to me that it was considered an appropriate solution. The end users were network engineers so they were _able_ to write the regexes but it seemed obvious to me that providing the user with a higher level parsing library would be much easier. It was something I wanted to POC but never found time in the end.