Regular Expressions
Today’s XKCD is brilliant.
That is pretty much how learning regular expressions for the first, second and third time felt for me.
Though, I was sitting on the train between CT and NYC many years ago, tossing together a set of regular expressions to do log transmogrification and analysis for noggin.com’s weblogs and Jerry Walker was the man on the rope swinging in to save the day. He turned broken line noise into working line noise!
January 10th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
The wankers who solve every text problem with such arcane constructs, Bill, as regular expressions, instead of solid programming languages like Java, have a merry time of it, but hardly impress me.
I mean, just try this “s/^\(..\). .\(.*\)er\(..\).* e\(…..\).*bl.\(.\) [^ ]* s\([c-u]*\).*cts\(…….\).*ke\(..\)[^m]*m\([^ ]*\).*/\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9/” on the sentence above. Certainly not self documenting, if you see what I mean!!!
January 10th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
As a perfect example, note that the dots in my regular expression, above, were munged to ellipses! Good blogging software can’t even read these things! Just proves my point!