8
bpaul
7y

A famous quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski:
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

I am living this nightmare. Joined a project where schmucks are parsing SQL using regular expressions. Talked to a friend, a compiler developer expert. He told me that regexes can't be used for checking if braces are matched. Pumping Lemma. Those fuckers should have used ANTLR or something. Anyways planning to leave this project.

Comments
  • 1
    My boss once (when I was still a programming noob) wanted me to find <a> tags in HTML using regex. Five years later I learned about pumping lemma.

    Regexes can be useful tho.
  • 0
    @LicensedCrime
    Looks like the Java regex engine doesn't support it. The code I was talking about is overflowing with regexes. Pure madness.
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