Regex came up so infrequent that I found myself referring to documentation whenever I needed to use it. But I always wondered, what are the jobs or roles that use it so often that they have mastered it.
That's somewhat alien to me, I suppose because over the years I just never stopped using regex in search/replace tools, which is daily exposure regardless of what code needs to be written.
Sometimes the patterns are dirt-simple, like `/\bfoo/` to find things that start with foo, or a `/foo.?bar/i` to try to find multiple variations of FooBar and fooBar and foo-bar and FOO_BAR. Other contexts outside an IDE include browser dev-tools, exploratory SQL queries on the database, searching centralized logs, and occasionally turning lines of text into spreadsheets via CSV.
None of that guarantees deep expertise of the weirder tricks, but it absolutely keeps the general knowledge "warm."
Sometimes the patterns are dirt-simple, like `/\bfoo/` to find things that start with foo, or a `/foo.?bar/i` to try to find multiple variations of FooBar and fooBar and foo-bar and FOO_BAR. Other contexts outside an IDE include browser dev-tools, exploratory SQL queries on the database, searching centralized logs, and occasionally turning lines of text into spreadsheets via CSV.
None of that guarantees deep expertise of the weirder tricks, but it absolutely keeps the general knowledge "warm."