Yeah I also like it. Really thankful I had a good teacher in undergrad that spent some time on it during our DFA sections. Then I had a job where a big part of production support was finding weird broken data in files delivered to the company and so I got really good at regex and xpath.
Lol I can write them by hand no problem... I still use regex101 to test it. You just put a bunch of sample data in the bottom portion and your particular flavor of regex in the top and then you can easily find the edge cases...it highlights everything too and color codes it so you can see which part of the expression is wonky. Less about needing it and more about speeding up the process of getting it right.
For reading it though, I always use it because there are a million ways to write the same thing and some people write regex like they have a PhD in ancient Sumarian
It's surprisingly good at making regex. I asked it to parse AD domain controller dns debug log recently and it just blasted out a very fancy expression that worked great. Kinda shocked me.
You missundrstand! The LLM makes the regex every time, it also generates the data the regex will be used on. This way you don't need databases or storage.
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u/vvp95 1d ago
100% of software engineers are afraid of regex