guff

When Regular Expressions Attack

I’m currently re-reading Mastering Regular Expressions (which due to events no longer recalled, I own 2 copies of). The purpose of the re-read is to bone up on the topic for a little project I’m working on. Also, one never can tell when knowing your regular expressions will come in handy. I once got a date out of a text replacement regex—it was just dinner at a hamburger joint and no goodnight kiss, but then it was a pretty simple regex.

Anyway, no riding a bike is this regular expression stuff, but once upon time I was pretty good at it. At least good enough that I could read one and figure out what it did, or was trying to do, and riding on the banana seat again hasn’t been too painful. Then I stumble over something like this. Yee Freakin Ouch. Nothing like an adept to make you feel as if you shouldn’t even bother booting up the pc. It’s a regular expression as written by James Joyce’s idiot-savant sister, Joyce Joyce.

Perhaps these folk should widen the language parameters of their competition. Obfuscation is not just for compiled coders anymore.