For the last seven or so years I’ve run into needing to use a regular expression a time or two. And usually, if I can’t google someone else’s regex, I decide to toss the whole thing out. In other words: I could never quite figure them out.
It’s kinda like PERL. In a crowd of nerds, I’d never admit to not really knowing it. Heck, in my peripheral knowledge I even know a few perl jokes… but for the life of me, I can’t read it or write it.
So when Jay mentioned that this week’s task would be building an HTML parser, I thought “cool”. When he mentioned it was a great way to wrap my head around regular expressions, I thought “oh, fuck”.
But I’ll be damned if this whole regex thing isn’t pretty damned kick-ass.
And now, of course, I’m thinking back on all the things I’ve built that had some kind of half-assed solution because I was to lazy (or afraid) to sit down and really try and understand just what that crazy syntax means.