[Rendello]

Fair enough. GP is right in that there's a lot of absolutism with regards to what regex can solve. I first learned recursive-descent parsing from Destroy All Software, where he used Regex for the lexing stage by trying to match the start of the buffer for each token. I'm glad I learned it that was, otherwise I probably would have gotten lost in the character-by-character lexing as a beginner and would've never considered using regex. Now I use regex in most of my parsers, to various degrees.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/a-com...

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As for GP's "solve a problem with a regex, now you’ve got two problems, hehe", I remember for years trying to use regex and never being able to get it to work for me. I told my friends such, "I've literally never had regex help in a project, it always bogs me down for hours then I give up". I'm not sure what happened, but one day I just got it, and I've never had much issue with regex again and use it everywhere.

[phatskat]

I had a hard time with complex regex until I started using them more in vim - the ability to see what your regex matches as you work is really helpful. Of course, this is even better now with sites like regexr and regex101

[Rendello]

Regex101 is always open when I'm doing regexes, what a great tool. Occasionally I use sites that build the graph so you can visualize the matching behaviour.

There are even tools to generate matching text from a regex pattern. Rust's Proptest (property-based testing) library uses this pattern to generate minimal failing counterexamples from a regex pattern. The tooling around Regex can be pretty awesome.