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Boost your Productiveness with RegEx (a little)

Jan Wedel on July 09, 2019

I love RegEx, I use it every day and I will show you how to use it to easily get some smaller and larger tasks done. But... Don’t use i...

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Mike • Jul 9 '19 • Edited

As an alternative to RegEx Golf, I've found Regex Crossword to be pretty fun!

Jan Wedel • Jul 9 '19

Thanks, I will have a look!
Looks like you’ve started a markdown link but missed the url... ;)

Mike • Jul 9 '19

lol oops: regexcrossword.com/

kip • Jul 10 '19

Good!

Larry Lancaster • Jul 10 '19

Great article, good topic. If you’re an expert, there’s no reason not to add regexes to your bag of tricks. The key is to understand not only what happens logically, but also the runtime consequences. For example, take PCRE2, an ubiquitously available library. In this flavor of extended regex, you can use greedy matching (i.e., \d++). Used right, along with other constructs, you can judiciously avoid backtracking by the regex state machine and make your regexes fast and lean. I would advise not to be afraid of them, but like swords, to respect them and understand how to work with them. So it is often with powerful things. :)

Jan Wedel • Jul 10 '19

Thanks 🙏
Since I would not consider myself as an expert, I would not do it :)
I would still vote against if there is any more readable alternative. Strive for readability/maintainability and only optimize for speed if it’s necessary.

Larry Lancaster • Jul 10 '19

Of course! Makes sense.

Aadi Bajpai • Jul 9 '19

I love regular expressions! I was able to circumvent using two whole different APIs by employing some very clever regex string manipulation in one of my projects. The speed improvement is unparalleled.

Jan Wedel • Jul 10 '19 • Edited

It depends on the circumstances and requirements but I’d still reply with:
dev.to/stealthmusic/comment/cnm2

Aadi Bajpai • Jul 10 '19

I'd say that regex should be used if they can make a significant difference and you're aware of the scope of the problem being solved by it. That's where Cloudflare went wrong, I'd say. I use it for url formatting so even if it goes wrong, all I get is a 404 hopefully :P

Justin Cooksey • Jul 9 '19

I really have to learn more regex. I use the online tools to figure what I need, but I really need to learn more on it, so it's more ingrained. Especially on search and replace in editors.
Thanks for the article.

Jan Wedel • Jul 9 '19

Thanks for your advise. I absolutely share your views, so I have to ask if you actually read the first section about „not to use it in production“? ;)
I even use the results of such an operation only for testing purposes.

Jan Wedel • Jul 9 '19

BTW, I just added a disclaimer, just in case what I wrote here could be misunderstood. I don’t mean something like „using regex is dangerous but I will show you how to do it right“. That’s absolutely not what I intended.

Rick McGavin • Jul 11 '19

I read this, and fatefully was given the task of taking taking two excel columns of 6,000 zip codes and turning them in to arrays. Made incredibly quick work of that, so thanks!