[jmnicolas]

Why use it though? I'd rather wright or read 30 lines of code instead of trying to decipher what a regex means or do and making sure it is covering all possible cases.

I don't understand the goodwill toward regexes. It's basically an embedded BrainFuck in your programming language.

I'm 14 years in my dev career, there never was a moment where not using regexes came to be a problem.

[da_chicken]

> Why use it though?

Because a well written regex performs extremely well (regex engines are often very highly optimized).

It gives you all the benefits of using a domain-specific language and using an extremely mature software library. Just like a domain-specific language, it will have a baked-in philosophy involving the exact task you want to accomplish, so it will not suffer from language vs algorithm impedence. Just like using a mature library, it will probably have accounted for weird oddball cases that you're not even thinking of and have enough features to do everything you will want.

> It's basically an embedded BrainFuck in your programming language.

I don't disagree. It's not easy to read and can be hard to maintain. There are ways to write regex such that it's easier to understand, but the syntax generally doesn't make it easy to do that and doesn't encourage you to spend the time on it.

However, when you see a regex, you do know that it's 100% used to manipulate strings. That alone tells you quite a bit about what is going on.

[boppo1]

I think it's case-by case. I once scraped a list of names and dates from individual Wikipedia pages. There were lots of formats like "1900-1950", "1900 - 1950", "(1900 - 1950)", "(1900 to 1950)", "1900 to cf. 1950", and so on. These were arbitrarily nested in the first couple sentences.

My thought was "Oh I think this is a job for that regex thing" and 35 minutes of googling syntax + a handful of passes later I had all the dates in a workable table. I have no idea how much code that would have taken. Albeit, I am a novice programmer.