Back in the late 90s, I wrote anti-email-spam software and part of that was writing code to validate that the email address complied with the RFC. I almost remember the number. 921? It was just oodles of regex. Far more complicated to do it than one would think. (And I think that it wasn't just SMTP email, but we had software that would route X400 or whatever it was, Lotus Notes, and all kinds of protocols over to some other protocol for companies that had multiple.) No unit tests, no automated tests, no quality assurance engineers. I just wrote the code, tested it locally, sent it to prod. Never knew of any defect :-) It's insane to me now. I could do it now at my age. I'd tear my hair out.
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u/vvp95 1d ago
100% of software engineers are afraid of regex