this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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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
It's entirely possible to parse HTML in PCRE. You shouldn't, but it is possible. The language stopped being strictly regular a long time ago and is entirely capable of doing it.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/4234491/830741
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
I've once written a JS decompiler (de-bundler?) using ~150 regex for step-wise transformations. Worked surprisingly well!
What eldritch beast was summoned as a result?
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"
It’s impossible to parse the whole syntax tree, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the subset you’re interested in.