Re: Regexes vs. Maintainability

[hil]

This is purely anecdotal, of course, but regexes are just plain fun - to write, anyway. Supporting other people's can be a major source of annoyance. How many of them are really understandable to the average coder?

Personally, I prefer a general comment and then comments on specific parts only if the expression is particularly intricate (as in the example above). In any case, I would be interested to see how many people really bother to comment their regexes beyond "parses $var" or some such thing. I'm sure there are plenty of horror stories floating around.

[mirod]

I tend to comment regexps like this:

$path=~/^\s*([\w-]+)  # elt
                 \s*\[\s*\@      #    [@
                 ([\w-]+)        #      att                     $1
                 \s*=\s*(["'])   #         = "          (or ',) $2
                 (.*?)           #            value             $3
                 \3\]\s*$/gx)    #                 "]   (or ')

It works very well for moderately complex regexps.