I still remember my doomed encounters with regular expressions back when I tried to learn them. In fact, I took pride in not using regular expressions. I always found a long workaround or a code snippet. I projected and blamed my own lack of expertise on the hard readability of regular expressions. This process continued until I was ready to face the truth: regular expressions are powerful, and they can save you a lot of time and headache.
Fast-forward a couple of years. People I worked with encountered the same problems. Some knew regular expressions, and others hated them. Among ...