On Thu, 7 Nov 2019 at 23:26, Anthony de Boer via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 06:42:44AM -0500, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
... Jeez regex is a pain - it took three minutes of staring at that just to figure it out, even though I knew what we were both trying to achieve.
Practice time!
Oooh, fun! The Hamlet puzzle took a few minutes to sort out. But then I'm not a regular crossworder.
One of the guys I work with claims that any use of regexen requires multiple lines of comment to explain, but I'm firmly of the opinion that being able to sight-read them is a basic Unix programming skill.
Eyeballing simple regex is hard enough, but mentally parsing out a complex full line regex that looks like inline garbage without the benefit of comments isn't something I recommend or appreciate. Some forms of regex support comments within the regex itself: https://www.regular-expressions.info/freespacing.html However ... "Of the flavors discussed in this tutorial, only ... the POSIX and GNU flavors don't support it." Which is where I most need it. Of course, you can still make standard shell script comments before or after the 'sed' block, and I'm very much in favour of those. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com