[mindcrime]

Same. I just don't use it often enough for it to really stick. For many years my regex knowledge was basically stuck at how to use ".*" and things like [a-d] or [a-dA-D] blah, etc. Never used backreferences, capture groups, etc.

The thing that finally forced me to dig a little deeper was an assignment at work that involved Apache HTTPD and mod_proxy and the need to define some really complex routing rules that were imposed on us by something upstream of our service. We wound up having to peek into the incoming URL and route things differently based on sub-elements of the overall path. So I finally had to learn to use capture groups and get into the difference between the "greedy" and "non greedy" matching, yadda, etc. And the thing is, when I figured it out and got all that working, I felt like I'd acquired a new super-power.

For about 3 weeks. Now, I'm pretty sure all of the new stuff I learned has totally escaped my memory again, because - once again - I haven't had any call to touch a regex in almost 2 years.

sigh I should probably look for an Anki deck on regexes and start doing spaced repetition on them just to try to finally get this stuff locked in.