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Jun 22, 2017 at 10:03 history edited ChrisF CC BY-SA 3.0
more info
May 23, 2017 at 12:40 history edited CommunityBot
replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/
May 5, 2015 at 12:34 history edited ChrisF CC BY-SA 3.0
edited for sense
Feb 24, 2014 at 22:25 history post merged (destination)
Dec 5, 2011 at 23:30 comment added Karoly Horvath "Basically, I think he means you should only use a regex if there's no other way of solving your problem. Any other solution is going to be easier to code, maintain and support." - seriously disagree.. Regexes are excellent tools, you just have to know their limits. A lot of tasks can be coded more elegantly with regexes. (but, just to make an example, you shouldn't use them to parse HTML)
May 20, 2011 at 3:57 comment added kevin cline I would much rather see a complex regular expression than a long series of calls to string methods. OTOH, I really hate seeing regular expressions misused to parse complex languages.
Oct 29, 2010 at 12:56 comment added Alex Feinman @Frank: if you make your comment an answer, I will vote for it instead. Yeah, regexps are hard to read, but it's the problem where people think they are a silver bullet for parsing turing-complete input that is the key.
Oct 29, 2010 at 10:05 history edited ChrisF CC BY-SA 2.5
clarification
Oct 29, 2010 at 10:03 comment added ChrisF @Roger - I know ;)
Oct 29, 2010 at 10:01 comment added Roger Pate @Chris: I picked C# because it's the most used tag; to point out the problem with "people have lots of questions, it must be difficult."
Oct 29, 2010 at 9:58 comment added ChrisF @Roger - I think C# is an easy language to pick up, but a difficult one to master. c/c++ on the other hand are hard to pick up and hard to master.
Oct 29, 2010 at 9:45 comment added Roger Pate Does this mean that by the number of questions in the SO [c#] tag, it is the hardest programming language to understand?
Oct 11, 2010 at 15:10 comment added Todd Williamson For certain situations regex is awesome. In many other cases not so much. At the other end it is a horrifying pit of despair. The problem often arises when someone learns about them for the first time and starts to see applications everywhere. Another famous saying: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Oct 11, 2010 at 14:53 comment added Frank Shearar And worse: they're just powerful enough to trick people into trying to use them to parse things they can't, like HTML. See the numerous questions on SO on "how do I parse HTML?"
Oct 11, 2010 at 13:32 history answered ChrisF CC BY-SA 2.5