1 year ago

Much as I like https://thenewstack.io/taming-text-search-with-the-power-of-regular-expressions/ (or regex), part of their longevity is due to their separate development from mainstream languages. Regex is a method of using pattern matching, and the regex language uses standard keyboard symbols as the special “meta” characters.

Building a regex can be a bit of a chore — I’ve seen it suggested that a lot of developers use Copilot to help them out.

Regex patterns include meta-rules at the end to guide behavior, which is unwieldy.

“Look for a capital letter” = letter.uppercase “any number of lower case letters” = oneOrMore(letter.lowercase).optionally “until a space” =.and whitespace