Are regular expressions worth the hassle?

Question

It strikes me that regular expressions are not understood well by the majority of developers. It also strikes me that for a lot of problems where regular expressions are used, a lump of code could be used instead. Granted, it might be slower and be 20 lines for something like email validation, but if performance of the code is not desperately important, is it reasonable to assume that not using regular expressions might be better practise?

I'm thinking in terms of maintenance of the code rather that straight line execution time.

Answer 1

Maintaining one regular expression is a lot less effort than maintaining 20 lines of code. And you underestimate the amount of code needed - for a regex of any complexity, the replacement code could easily be 200 rather than 20 lines.

Answer 2

Professional developers should be familiar with basic syntax

At the very least. In all the years long I've been a professional developer I haven't come across a developer that wouldn't know what Regular Expressions are. It's true, not everybody likes using them or is very good at knowing its syntax, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't use them. Developers should learn the syntax and regular expressions should be used.

It's like: "Ok. We have Lambda expressions, but who cares, I can still do it the old fashioned way."

Not learning key aspects of professional development is pure laziness and shouldn't be tolerated for too long.