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!
>
> https://regexcrossword.com
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:
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.
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