• dactylotheca@suppo.fi
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      5 months ago

      Oh yeah they definitely have uses, but there’s a real tendency for people to go a bit crazy with them. Complex regexen aren’t exactly readable, there’s all kinds of fun performance gotchas, there’s sometimes other tools/algorithms that are more suitable for the task, and sometimes people try to use them to eg. parse HTML because they don’t know that it is literally impossible to use regular expressions to parse languages that aren’t regular

      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I’ve once written a JS decompiler (de-bundler?) using ~150 regex for step-wise transformations. Worked surprisingly well!

          • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Well… No new ones, at least? Though it was around that time that I started hearing whispers in the night… “You can use WASM to ship Client-Side PHP”

        • dactylotheca@suppo.fi
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          5 months ago

          Oh yeah, extensions which make them non-regular definitely can make it possible, but just because it’s now somewhat possible with some regex engines doesn’t mean it’s a good idea

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        it is literally impossible to use regular expressions to parse languages that aren’t regular

        It’s impossible to parse the whole syntax tree, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the subset you’re interested in.