this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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Regex really isn't that bad when using named capture groups.
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
I've once written a JS decompiler (de-bundler?) using ~150 regex for step-wise transformations. Worked surprisingly well!
What eldritch beast was summoned as a result?
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"