| > you can’t make me learn new things, damn you With regex, I won’t. I rarely include much in terms of regex in my PRs, usually small filters for text inputs for example. More complex regexes are saved for my own use to either parse out oddly formatted data, or as vim find/replace commands (or both!). When I do use a complex regex, I document it thoroughly - not only for those unfamiliar, but also for my future self so I have a head-start when I come back to it. Usually when I get called out on it in a PR, it’s one of two things: - “Does this _need_ to be a regex?” I’m fine to justify it, and it’s a question I ask teammates especially if it’s a sufficiently complex expression I see
- “What’s that do?” This is rarely coming from an “I don’t know regex” situation, and more from an “I’m unfamiliar with this specific part of regex” eg back references. I think the former is 100% valid - it’s easy to use too much regex, or to use it where there are better methods that may not have been the first place one goes: need to ensure a text field always displays numbers? Use a type=number input; need to ensure a phone number is a valid NANP number? Regex, baby! The latter is of course valid too, and I try to approach any question about why a regex was used, or what it does, with a link to a regex web interface and an explanation of my thinking. I’ve had coworkers occasionally start using more regex in daily tasks as a result, and that’s great! It can really speed up things tasks that would otherwise be crummy to do by hand or when finagling with a parser. Bonus: some of my favorite regex adventures: - Parsing out a heavily customizable theme’s ACF data stuffed into custom fields in a Wordpress database, only to shove them into a new database with a new and %better% ACF structure
- Taking PDF bank statements in Gmail, copying the text, and using a handful of painstakingly written find/replace vim regexes to parse the goop into a CSV format because why would banks ever provide structured data??
- Copy/pasting all of the Music League votes and winners from a like 20-person season into a text doc and converting it to a JSON format via regex that I could use to create a visualization of stats.
- Not parsing HTML (again, anyways) |