What are some Regular Expression concepts you find hard to grok?
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Posted on Jul 3
What are some Regular Expression concepts you find hard to grok?
I was reading a Tweet from my friend Amy on Twitter where they put out a Twitter poll that is currently going on.
What emotional reaction do you have toward regular expressions (regex)?14:49 PM - 03 Jul 2022
to which I replied in my funny way.
@AmyShackles /(?<reaction>Fear|Anger|Disgust|Excitement)/i15:14 PM - 03 Jul 2022
And this got me to thinking that many folks struggle with regular expressions. What are some things that trip you up when it comes to regular expressions?
Discussion (9)
I said this on Twitter but for me the thing that trips me up is constantly having to translate in my head between the thing I want to do in a regular expression and the specific regex syntax I need to accomplish it. The regex mental model is actually quite simple but the syntax is a nightmare.
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The book Mastering Regular Expressions: Powerful Techniques for Perl and Other Tools by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl really helped me grok regular expressions. Excellent book.
Language agnostic, really; it's about the regex concepts.
Yeah, I have that book. It's really great!
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Greedy / non-greedy lookback / forward.
Standard pattern matching I'm pretty good at now with regex but capture groups combined with multiple captures and the greedy stuff is a little crazy still.
I found using regexr.com really helpful as you can visualise quickly what's going on
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It's when it gets -- 'nested' I guess? But when there need to be multiple matches for several pieces of the pattern and that gets reflected in the syntax, I start to get confused.
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