From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-11-19T04:26:08+09:00
Subject: Tales of the Regex (Re: About Regular Expressions)


James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Nov 18, 2004, at 9:44 AM, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
> 
>> My opinion is this: Regexp's are for CS-heads --those who really love
>> programming for its it's own sake. Regexp are about as terse and 
>> cryptic as
>> one can get, and thus have a steep learning curve.
> 
> 
> My experience has been the opposite.
> 
> At my wife's company, they spend a significant portion of everyday 
> importing raw text reports from their database into Excel for various 
> uses.  Some of the reports do not go into Excel well at all.  A large 
> chunk of most employee's day is spent cleaning up these reports, by 
> hand.  (I'm considering one of these reports for a future Ruby Quiz, if 
> that gives you any idea how wonky they can be.)
> 
...

My experience is that I use REs on a sporadic basis, and tend to learn 
and remember just enough to get a task done.  But by the time I need to 
write another RE, if it isn't something trivial, I have to go looking 
for docs and such.  And the docs often do not explain how to do certain 
things, or tell me if it is even possible.

(An example: Can I write an RE that tells me if a given string contains 
all substrings in a given set of substrings, irrespective of the order 
of the substrings in either the target string or the set of substrings?  )

But, to be fair, some of these sorts of requests may be beyond a basic 
cookbook or newbie intro Web page.  So, it's either get the O"Reilly 
book, post a question, or hack away.

In general, I don't really care if people are too lazy to look things 
up, if they don't make it a regular habit and overrun the list.   I 
scan message headers, do a sort of triage for attention, and ignore 
many, many things.  Pretty painless.  So, stupid questions are welcome. 
(I'd hate to feel reluctant to ask a stupid question myself; I have too 
many of them.)

One a side note, I wonder what it would take to write a domain language, 
parable by Ruby, that let one write REs in plain-ish English?  Maybe 
take some of the mystery out of regular expressions for most of the 
common cases.  (Or would that just get people dependent on too much 
hand-holding?)


James