Nick Maclaren wrote: > For reasons that I won't explain, as they are too complicated > and not terribly relevant, I am interested in discovering what > people actually use regular expressions for. Not the subject > domain, but the construction of the regular expressions.
After I figured out how to solve a problem, I'll surely rewrite the solution again in pure Perl5 regular expressions in order to outrun the normal mental degradation processes related to aging ... :) > I know about computer scientists and parsing, and I know about > the use of relatively simple ones for things like extracting > HTML links from Web pages. But I don't have much feel for the > (probably rare but difficult) uses of more complex ones for Using complex regular expressions is like tank destruction with contact charges glued on them. Only a few people will even survive the first "usage", but survivors will then eventually be able to destroy almost every tank with tremendous speed and precision. > other purposes. I have heard of several such uses, but don't > have an overall idea of what is going on. On business software projects, maintainability is a key prerequisite - after using complex regular expressions on business critical parts you are bound to involve very very expensive maintenance programmers ... :) What exactly did you "hear" of several "uses"? Which application? Academia, Business, ...? Regards M. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
