Help with Regex (was Re: Switch, Case and wild-cards?)

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:

> Maybe I'm missing something (nothing particularly unusual there), but . . .
>
> I don't really "get" REGEX.
>
> And,frankly, why on earth would I, or anyone else for that matter, want
> to read through some awfully long, wordy and obscure load of b*mf about it?

There's nothing regular about "regular expressions", and like so many 
things in computing they seem to have come about through a series of 
evolutionary steps which may well be characterized as accidents.

But it's the cryptic nature of regex that makes it so useful, providing 
a uniquely compact way of handling a vast range of text parsing in ways 
that would take many dozens of lines of code to do by any other means.

So whether we like regex or not, it's here to stay, useful and 
ubiquitous enough to be worth the learning curve.

That said, being a very generalized subsystem it's often not the fastest 
in execution speed in spite of being fast to type.

In many cases, writing a pull-parser or other offset-based function for 
a specific need will yield a much faster result than using regex.

The downside of not using regex, though, is the time required to write 
such functions every time you need 'em.  For performance-critical 
operations it's often well worth it, but for less critical routines 
regex may be the more productive option.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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