Regex
Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven't touched it in like a year.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
22 points (95.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
24980 readers
1388 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Most of regex is pretty basic and easy to learn, it's the look ahead and look behind that are the killers imo
(?=) for positive lookahead and (?!) for negative lookahead. Stick a < in the middle for lookbehind.
You always forget regex syntax?
I've always found it simple to understand and remember. Even over many years and decades, I've never had issues reading or writing simple regex syntax (excluding the flags and shorthands) even after long regex breaks.
It's not about the syntax itself, it's about which syntax to use. There are different ones and remembering which one is for which language is tough.
You get used to it, I don't even see the code—I just see: group... pattern... read-ahead...
PSA: Run ShellCheck on your shell scripts. It turns up a shocking number of programming errors. https://www.shellcheck.net/
I mastered and forgot almost entirely RegEx several times now
Clearly you don't write enough bash scripts.
Or scripts for basically any other variant of the Bourne shell. They are, for the most part, very cross compatible.
That's the only reason I've ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I've worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.
I don't normally say this, but the AI tools I've used to help me write bash were pretty much spot on.
Yes, with respect to the grey bearded uncles and aunties; as someone who never "learned" bash, in 2025 I'm letting a LLM do the bashing for me.
Until the magic incantations you don't bother to understand don't actually do what you think they're doing.
I wonder if there's a chance of getting rm -rf /* or zip bombs. Those are definitely in the training data at least.
The classic rm -rf $ENV/home where $ENV can be empty or contain spaces is definitely going to hit someone one day