On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Peter Sergeant wrote: > This seems to be a recurring theme - regular expressions are hard. This > is not my experience. After QBasic, Perl was the first language I > learned, and regular expressions were a topic I found very easy (and > there were plenty of topics I found hard, I'm sure). I wonder why it is > some people find regexes such a mind-twister.
Not sure you can give a complete answer to this one, however I for one find regular expressions tricky due to the lack of decent docs available for them - particularly lack of examples to work from. Now I know I should just go and buy a book, however if anyone has any links to sites which they have found of use it would be much appreciated. Other then this, whilst regular expressions can be very powerful tools, they are not the most accessible (Write Once, Read Never is often the case for particularly complex ones) which makes the routine of reading other people's code to learn how it works a trickier one to approach. Having spent most of today wielding sed I think I'm slowly getting the hang of them, but my knowledge is only a small subset I am sure. RegExs are a brick wall I will continue to bash my head against, however I don't see the learning curve getting any easier. A. -- aca114
