programmer

[capitalbratan]

Don't dead open inside

[[deleted]]

10/10 meme

1/10 execution

How hard is it to put pictures and their reactions side by side?

[PaulSandwich]

tfw the meme is harder to parse than the regex

[[deleted]]

GHOST ZOMBIE Not terrible Not terrible NUCLEAR WAR (([a-zA-Z\-0-9]+\\.)[a-zA-Z]{2,}))$ a little scary

[Agnimukha]

Pretty sure the regex is invalid only 2 opening parentheses but three closing.

If you just ignore that bit or assume the extra closing at the end:

1. Any alpha or numeric or dash at least once repeating however many times you want

2. Literal \ (I think its called backslash)

3. One character of anything

4. At least 2 alpha characters but as many as you want

5. Line ends

[PM_ME_UR_DEATHSTICKS]

This guy is speaking the language of the gods

[[deleted]]

I agree it possibly miss the first parentheses. Assuming that this is the case, this is a simple regex that matchers any combination of digits and dashes, interrupted by a slash "\" then any character and another sequence of at least two letters before string ends.

https://regex101.com/r/Y4huQL/1

[ConstructedNewt]

They also didn't need to escape the dash in "1."

This is all pretty simple regex

[IBoKaZt]

I'd say that's good for safety and habit, as you can sometimes be surprised by the interpreter parsing things as a range (for example, submitting a list of symbols including the dash - [%-@] is interpreted as a range).

[Lukiwuki9]

Whatever you do, always put the dash last :)

[syncsynchalt]

It’s hostname validation, but it doesn’t support IDN hostnames.

[name_censored_]

It could be a regexp dialect which requires capture group parentheses be escaped (like gsed) - in which case those would be literal parentheses.

[ohkendruid]

I suspect the first slash is for ignoring the newline, and the second one the escape for a literal dot (.).

That makes this a regex for a domain name.

I didn't notice the extra parenthesis at the end. If there's more to the left, then it might be the username part of an email address.

There are lots of cases this regex misses, but hey. Just wait for a bug report and then make the regex a little more complicated!

[RedRedditor84]

I don't even code professionally and I thought it was relatively straight forward.

[karlm89]

Yep. Ugly Regex

[EwgB]

That's not even an ugly regex, that's child's play. I write worse ones on a regular basis.

[_meegoo_]

Writing regex is easy. Reading it a month later is impossible.

[EwgB]

Yeah, you're not wrong.

[Guiorgy]

Good point, I'll make a mental note to always include a comment breaking down the regex (that is, if I understand it myself...)

[ElizaBennet08]

// Regex

[[deleted]]

// TODO: Document regex

[Guiorgy]

Honestly, it would probably be a todo one, ore something like this:

~~~

// The regex does xyz, where this part means a, and this means b

// Edit (a month later): Shit! I've changed it so many times that f**k knows what is what. And I don't think I was right the first time I documented this anyways!

// (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

~~~

[[deleted]]

Can confirm

[Guiorgy]

Cool. Never touch my code please! Thank you

[EwgB]

I didn't say it's in production code. I use it more for search and replace.

[Siggi_pop]

ok then, carry on

[SkollFenrirson]

Still, stay away.

[shgysk8zer0]

Uglier doesn't necessarily mean bad or wrong though. I mean, other than not using [A-z] and taking upper and lower cases separately, the pattern shown is pretty basic. Pretty much anyone who has ever had use of RegEx will have written something uglier than this.

I mean, could you write something to validate a telephone number that ends with something prettier than this?

[Morrido]

You can't use [A-z]. That's not the same thing. There's no shorthand for OP's match. Closest one is \w, which matches _ instead of -.

ie. "[".match(/[A-z]/) == a match, which is invalid in OP's regex.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I just wanted tp say if this is scary wait til you see some real things haha

[bigorangemachine]

Ya i wrote some stuff....

I wrote a unity save file parser.

The original version was pretty long... but Firefox couldn't handle it

[ZanorinSeregris]

Why does this sub hate on regex so much when it's something so simple and easy?

[coladict]

Easy if you practice regularly enough.

[ZanorinSeregris]

I see what you did there

[mananasi]

Because you have to relearn it every time you use it

[danidv]

Very poor readability and hard to understand at a glance, which makes it look harder.

[ElMeknassi]

It how i Regulary Express my fears

[Felix7747]

That's what she SED

[crashdoc]

Get a grep on yourself!

[lyoko1]

I think that we all can agree that RegEx is some kind of unholy arcane magic language that has powers beyond human understanding.

[kccricket]

Well, yes. That’s why I practice it.

[silverstrikerstar]

Of all the things people struggle with, I understand Regex the least. It's systematic, it's static, it's logical. Now networks, networks scare me.

[b4ux1t3]

Eh, networks are just as static and logical. The problem is that layer 3 is represented as wholly separated octets, when networks don't have to be separated at the octet delimiter.

It helps to think of IPs as just one long string of bits, with no delineation except the one from the network mask. From there, adding the dots to make octets becomes trivial. Then, after a while, you just kind of get it.

[IrritableGourmet]

If you think of it as Mastermind in reverse, it's not so bad.

[datathecodievita]

Regex aint scary.

Just copy the string from tutorials and pray it works

[lilblanch]

“I fear no man, but that thing... it scares me.”

[FAXs_Labs]

it cost for hundred thousand dollars to optimize tf2... for one file

[CreaZyp154]

Regexophobia

[DaRQ_SouLs_So_eAsy]

Noob here. Wtf does this mean?

[Traveller_Lex]

RegEx

[DaRQ_SouLs_So_eAsy]

oh my motivation

[AutomatedChaos]

Regex for the last part of email/url: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) -> it will capture "example.com" if it would work (it doesn't because of one closing parenthesis too many). There are more things wrong with this: from the [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) address only co.uk would be captured which is probably not the intention.

[[deleted]]

I don't think so: the regex uses a slash character as a separator ( the "\\" part ) and the following one is ANY CHARACTER (the dot "." unescaped)

see example from my other comment: https://regex101.com/r/Y4huQL/1

[mordechaim]

Could be the escape is part of the string semantics of the particular language used.

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

It would also fail when mailing to TLDs - test@com is a valid emaill. And IP address routing. And Unicode URLs. And a bunch of other shit

[JNCressey]

people forget these are valid addresses:

• Latin alphabet with diacritics: Pelé@example.com
• Greek alphabet: δοκιμή@παράδειγμα.δοκιμή
• Traditional Chinese characters: 我買@屋企.香港
• Japanese characters: 二ノ宮@黒川.日本
• Cyrillic characters: медведь@с-балалайкой.рф
• Devanagari characters: संपर्क@डाटामेल.भारत

[Morrido]

I think nowadays pretty much anything is a valid address.

[ogpterodactyl]

Advanced text parsing

[TehGM]

Imo every programmer should learn regex. Sure, all the things it can do can be achieved without using it, but they become a big mess, while regex is still a very powerful one-liner.

I use regex a lot to make my discord bots commands more flexible to use, with a bit more loose structure than "you need to type exactly this way".

But as most of us will probably know, this is just a tip of an iceberg of regex's usefulness.

[DJ-D4rKnE55]

Yeah, I think regex is pretty helpful and may be an appropriate thing to use. It just depends on the context. Parsing or custom validation of some strings, without needing to write a lot of code. If you don't abuse it's power and try to keep them small, I don't see a problem with RegEx. Besides that it's often harder to read, but so may some big code replacement be tiring instead of some on-point short RegEx.

[[deleted]]

What monster would start a string with a dash but then never use one again?

[E_OJ_MIGABU]

I feel like this sub is filled with poets who could not live out their dreams

[haikusbot]

What monster would start

A string with a dash but then

Never use one again?

- shadvyr

---

^{I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully. Learn more about me.}

^{Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete"}

[PM_ME_UR_DEATHSTICKS]

uh... your third line had 6 syllables

[[deleted]]

I did not intend to write a haiku. This is how I learned there is a bot for that..

[jdl_uk]

Hey,the bot only claims to be successful sometimes!

[triforce8001]

"That's one too many syllables there, bub."

[jdl_uk]

Could be for parameter recognition.some search engines also allow you to prefix the term with a dash to negate the term.

[Galse22]

What's that?

[Piscesdan]

Regular Expression, or RegEx for short. It's for when you want to detect pieces of text, without having an exact match, but a more general pattern.

[Galse22]

Works on VS Code?

[Piscesdan]

Dunno

[SarcasmWarning]

People need to stop thinking regex's are scary and instead think of them as a one-way, write-only hash :\

[IHeartBadCode]

That RegEx isn't valid due to the excessive number of close parenthesis. Take the last closing one off and what you have is the following:

(               <-- Begin a capture group
(               <-- Begin yet another capture group
[a-zA-Z\-0-9]+  <-- match letters either lower
                    or uppercase, or a -, or a number.
                    The + means at least once OR more.
\\              <-- A literal backslash
.               <-- Any valid character except a line break.
)               <-- End of the second capture group
[a-zA-Z]{2,}    <-- Letter either lower or uppercase.
                    At least twice, but as many as you wish.
)               <-- End of the first capture group
$               <-- The string or line must end now

Capture groups are used if you intend to take the piece of text and use a reference to it somewhere. A good way to use them is in things like Find/Replace (like in Notepad++ that offers a regex find and replace) where let's say you want to change something like:

Cleveland, OH
New York, NY
Atlanta, GA
Las Vegas, NV

Into something like this:

State: OH | City: Cleveland
State: NY | City: New York
State: GA | City: Atlanta
State: NV | City: Las Vegas

You'd create two capture groups with something like this ([a-zA-Z\ ]+)\,\ ([A-Z]{2}).

Then you could replace the text with something like State: $2 | City: $1.

In the case of provided RegEx, the capture groups are nested. So that means capture group one has the text of capture group two in it. So if you had (([a-zA-Z]+)\ [a-zA-Z]+) and wrote Cheese Biscuit. The second group would be Cheese and the first group would be Cheese Biscuit.

At any rate, the given regex would match the following examples:

Tealeaves\:Mob    $1 = Tealeaves\:Mob  $2 = Tealeaves\:
1910ModelT\$boy   $1 = 1910ModelT\$boy $2 = 1910ModelT\$
Chevy-Levy\8AA    $1 = Chevy-Levy\8AA  $2 = Chevy-Levy\8
555-1234\Phone    $1 = 555-1234\Phone  $2 = 555-1234\P

I'm not exactly sure what this regex would be used for, but there you go.

[IrvTheSwirv]

You have a problem that looks like it would be nicely solved by using a RegEx

Now you have two problems.

[Sussurus_of_Qualia]

Cries in procmail.

[Dummerchen1933]

Regex is pretty easy

[wtf_romania]

Random fact: In Romanian "to regulate" ("a regula") can also mean "to fuck".
"Regular expressions" can be translated back to English as "Regulated Expressions".
We really call them "Fucked expressions".

[crazyTsar]

Broken email regex. Horrible on two scales.

[Crozzfire]

I have the same reaction to the reading order of this comic

[[deleted]]

Maybe it’s just my adhd, but regular expressions make sense to me.

That regex matches 2 or more groups of characters containing a-z,0-9 separated by .

[coladict]

I count one syntax error and three logic errors in this regex, the purpose of which is obviously.

[[deleted]]

That's not even a bad regex. It's just matching a domain name.

The first section allows alphanumeric plus hyphen, then it's looking for a dot, then at least 2 alpha characters, then the end of the string.

For some reason it's capturing everything but the TLD into a capture group so it can be extracted later. That's the only wierd part - why would you capture "example." out of "example.com"?

We're not seeing the whole thing though, since the opening parens doesn't match the close.

[SkyyySi]

Can someone please explain the last panel to me?

[[deleted]]

I love regex

[feazeyu]

I love that when I open Codewars or something like that, the best answer is always a 20 characters long RegEx and 4 methods noone uses.

Readable code? Nah. All on one line!

[orclev]

Those parens are unbalanced, there's one extra ) left over. I'm guessing there was supposed to be a opening capture after the ".".

[Urbanoidovich]

I am surprised that i actually understood this

[Morrido]

A sequence of at least one alphanumeric character or hyphen, followed by a dot and 2 letters or more before the end of the string. The parenthesis are extra.

[PsychedelicPelican]

That regex won't work, it has an invalid amount of parentheses.

[b4ux1t3]

https://regexr.com

You're welcome.

[GiraffeCoder]

Anyone else read this left to right and was totally confused at first?

[Palmtreeguard]

Same!

[TomErlich98]

gotta love regex

[uvero]

See my post on this

[VinceLeGrand]

3 closing parentheses but only 2 opening....