Who is afraid of regex?
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Mike Hankey wrote:
dark matter
Dark Matter[^]; great series. A shame it only went three seasons.
Software Zen:
delete this;I enjoyed the series right up until they were able to insert a little card into their existing engine that allowed them to travel anywhere immediately. I know that FTL is imaginary, but I'd think that "blink" might have required a completely different set of physics requiring a new engine or something. My "willing suspension of disbelief" became unwilling at that point.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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(I'm ignoring backtracking regex here because it's dirty, and algorithmically less useful except for making it easier for the user to match text) Anyway it's just a tiny functional programming language with only ()|?* 4 explicit operators and 1 implicit one. Representing the regex programming language as code: Any regex is mathematically equivelent to the DFA state machine it represents, and can be converted algorithmically back and forth to and from a state machine and a regular expression. Perfect compilation/decompilation. So you can use them to match text (boring!) Or you can use them to generate code for state machines (less boring!) And yet I've met a lot of programmers that either loathe them, are intimidated by them, or both. They're wonderful little things, with interesting mathematical properties, but more importantly, they're useful for everything quick and dirty.
Real programmers use butterflies
not afraid, but when you only need to make some regex once a year or less, It generally takes a bit to remember the all rules correctly to get the desired results. long regex's can be very cryptic, so I generally tend to break it down with lots of notes about each section for the future me that might have to modify it.