Re: [Try-out] Regexp do's and don'ts

[gumpu]

in reply to Regexp do's and don'ts

Hoi,

Good stuff! Has the potential be very useful for newbies. One point:

"5. Don't use regexes for formats without a definite syntaxis, like human language. Regexes are good for pattern matching (and substitution), not for langague analyzing."

Think you have to be a bit more specific here. Computer languages have a definte syntax but using regular expressions to parse them can be a very painful process. (I Know this from experience cause I once tried to make a code beautifier for C++ and Pascal). In those cases a proper parser (say Parse::RecDescent) is much better.

If you are just trying to find simple things in source code, for instance #include statements or simply formatted comment blocks, regular expressions would be fine.

[Anonymous Monk]

as long as you don't define better as faster, yes, it is much better :D