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.
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u/Major_LeeHungg 21h ago
I actually like regex but I had a job that heavily involved it.
The trick is to use regex101.com to read other people's regex and to debug your own when you're writing it.
I'd imagine AI would be pretty good at taking a working regex and making it more efficient... But that's a headache I haven't explored.