“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
Jamie Zawinski
My first impression of regex expressions is that they are ugly to look at. I have encountered regex before, but I always been too intimidated to make sense of them. In order to start the learning curve, I first watched The Coding Train tutorials on regex expressions and created a cheatsheet for myself.
Then, I tried to practice my skills playing a little bit of Regular Expression Crossword and Regex Golf.
Regex Golf was definitely more challenging out of the two and I got stuck on the “Abba” challenge. I knew how to select for what I didn’t want, but could not figure out how to say select the opposite of this entire expression. Is that possible?
I recognize the power of regex expressions and I am motivated to keep practicing them. Although they care still a bit hard to read, a well written expression can simplify your program immensely. I want to experiment using them in my Verb Flip project so that I can retain punctuation and capitalization of the original sentence.
