From: "Sean Middleditch" <elanthis / awesomeplay.com>
>
> On Sun, 2001-11-04 at 21:00, Todd Gillespie wrote:
> > Would one rather spend some quality time learning to use regexes fully, or
> > spend an indefinite amount of time debugging your one-off parser?
> 
> If it takes more time to make such a freakin simplistic parser, the
> programmer should consider a different career.  Jesus, I wrote things
> like that when I was 12.  And no, I probably don't know the full extent
> of regex's, but since most real code is a hell of a lot easier to debug
> and faster and more powerful than what regex's can do, or much less were
> designed to, I'll keep regex's where they belong and use some real code
> to get the real work done.

Hmm, it was a toss-up between,

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

and

"Come over to the dark side.  I am your father's brother's nephew's
cousin's former roommate."

:-)

We just replaced what was a 600+ line inflexible, subset-of-HTML-compliant
lexer-in-Java, with a few lines of regexp.  The regexp version is HTML 4.0
compliant (and passes all its unit tests :)

And so we all wrote parsers the hard way when we were twelve.  But regexps
have a lot to offer, even if they can't, indeed, do everything.

And they look a lot, lot less cryptic after grokking a few rules and
patterns about how they're put together.


Regards,

Darth Bill