this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I have to use a ton of regex in my new job (plz save me), and I use ChatGPT for all of it. My job would be 10x harder if it wasn't for ChatGPT. It provides extremely detailed examples and warns you of situations where the regex may not perform as expected. Seriously, try it out.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have yet to see a regex that is so complicated that I would need some help. I expect programmers to know how to use regexes but it seems that it's not the case. And when it becomes too big, you always can write verbose regexes with comments, it's even easier. If someone could show me something too difficult for a human being (excluding the regex to validate emails), I'm interested.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Regex isn't difficult, just annoying to ensure it is bug-free. If ChatGPT can help, then I don't know why you wouldn't be in favor of it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not that I'm incapable of evaluating regex, but rather the mental burden of evaluating complex regex statements and determining their purpose can be time-consuming. Why take 20 minutes to understand some regex when ChatGPT can do it in 20 seconds?

[–] ChristinWhite 8 points 1 year ago

A coworker once defined regex as a write-only language and he definitely had a point. I love regex but it can be time consuming figuring out exactly what a complex regex expression is doing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's often developers who never took a finite automata class who I've seen struggle with regular expressions.

It's kind of like writing code in C while not understanding how memory management works

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh. That class looked hard as hell, I didn't take it, and now I'm 2 years out of school still googling regex every time I need it.

Maybe I should do some reading 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It was mandatory. I'm glad I took it, but I'm glad it's over 😂😂😂

Just look up how finite automatas work. You don't need to understand turing machines or turing completeness