• qaz
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    010 months ago

    Regex really isn’t that bad when using named capture groups.

    • dactylotheca
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      010 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

      • @FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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        010 months ago

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

        • dactylotheca
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          10 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

      • @bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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        010 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.