By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: October 5, 2014
If you work for any given amount of time as a software developer, one problem you’ll end up with is parsing structured text to extract meaningful information.
I’ve faced this issue more than I care to remember. I even think that’s why I learned regular expressions in the first place. But, as Internet wisdom will teach you regexes are only suitable for a subset of the parsing problems out there. We learn it at school: grammars are the way to go. Still, it is my deep belief that most engineers, when faced with a parsing problem, will first try to weasel their way out using regular expressions. Why? Well ...