• dactylotheca@suppo.fi
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    4 months ago

    Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

      • dactylotheca@suppo.fi
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        4 months ago

        Oh yeah they definitely have uses, but there’s a real tendency for people to go a bit crazy with them. Complex regexen aren’t exactly readable, there’s all kinds of fun performance gotchas, there’s sometimes other tools/algorithms that are more suitable for the task, and sometimes people try to use them to eg. parse HTML because they don’t know that it is literally impossible to use regular expressions to parse languages that aren’t regular

          • dactylotheca@suppo.fi
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            4 months ago

            Oh yeah, extensions which make them non-regular definitely can make it possible, but just because it’s now somewhat possible with some regex engines doesn’t mean it’s a good idea

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I’ve once written a JS decompiler (de-bundler?) using ~150 regex for step-wise transformations. Worked surprisingly well!

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Well… No new ones, at least? Though it was around that time that I started hearing whispers in the night… “You can use WASM to ship Client-Side PHP”

        • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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          4 months ago

          it is literally impossible to use regular expressions to parse languages that aren’t regular

          It’s impossible to parse the whole syntax tree, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the subset you’re interested in.

    • MashedTech@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I learned Regex once and now it just works. Only problem for me is using MacOS so the Regex flavors aren’t consistent. But once I sort that, it’s smooth sailing.

  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    Regex feels distinctly eldritch to me. Like, a lot of computing knowledge feels like magic, but regex feels like the kind of magic you get by consorting with dark forces

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      4 months ago

      I don’t. It may look less like line noise, but it doesn’t unravel the underlying complexity of what it does. It’s just wordier without being helpful.

      https://www.wumpus-cave.net/post/2022/06/2022-06-06-how-to-write-regexes-that-are-almost-readable/index.html

      Edit: also, these alternative syntaxes tend to make some easy cases easy, but they have no idea what to do with more complicated cases. Try making nested capture groups with these, for instance. It gets messy fast.

      • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        it doesn’t unravel the underlying complexity of what it does… these alternative syntaxes tend to make some easy cases easy, but they have no idea what to do with more complicated cases

        This can be said of any higher-level language, or API. There is always a cost to abstraction. Binary -> Assembly -> C -> Python. As you go up that chain, many things get easier, but some things become impossible. You always have the option to drop down, though, and these regex tools are no different. Software development, sysops, devops, etc are full of compromises like this.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Exactly, at the end of the day it’s about using the right tool for the job. Code that’s clear and declarative is easier to maintain, so it makes sense to default to it, but nothing stops you from using low level constructs if you really need to.

  • itsathursday@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Named groups are nice but can I please define a group more than once because maybe I want to group my data and consolidate values in a logical way without you complaining I have already used a group previously. I know I did, I’m the one telling you, now capture it twice!

  • jaybone@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Can you actually name capture groups, or this means how you can refer to them by number?

  • neidu2@feddit.nl
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    4 months ago

    I don’t see the problem. But that’s probably because my goto-language is perl.