philnash

That’s brilliant!

JavaScript's regex engine isn't the only one to have these problems. There certainly are other implementations, like Re2 and Rust's implementation, that don't have this issue. But they also lack some of the features of the JS implementation too.

While this article is about JavaScript specifically, these issues certainly exist in other regex engines too.

Ah, I didn’t realise there was a regex channel here. Thanks!

The only real way to validate an email address is send it an email and see if it arrives! I'm sure many of us have fallen to the urge to validate an email with a regex though, and yes, it's just too dangerous! I definitely like the simplicity of checking for an @.

I think regular expressions are actually very tempting to use because they seem hard. I feel like I go through this XKCD comic every time the opportunity to use a regex comes up. But string functions often have the answer. I hope, if this article achieves anything, it just stops people using regex to trim whitespace!

Thanks!

I think you're absolutely right about the difficulty for developers inadvertently getting the legacy assert behaviour. Though I hope if they do that, they at least recognise that they can use the strict methods.

The early module had both non-strict and strict methods, even from that early time, so the original author recognised the need for using ===, but I guess wanted to be flexible and allow for == usage too. Perhaps this was a bad decision, but it was made in version 0.1.21, so I would guess there was a lot of fast work going on with Node at the time and maybe not everything was thought through in as much depth as it could be. It's possible that one day the strict module may take over the place of the existing assert module, but that would be quite the breaking change!