this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
888 points (98.5% liked)
Programmer Humor
20704 readers
1903 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It helps if you break it apart into its component parts. Which is like anything else, really, but we've all accepted that regexes are supposed to run together in an unreadable mess. No reason it has to be that way.
If they are Perl regexes, like all regexes are supposed to be, you can have non-semantic whitespace and comments.
But if you are using some system that enforces something different, you are out of luck.
Not necessarily. For just debugging purposes, you can still break them up to help understand them. Even ignoring that, there are options in languages that don't implement /x.
https://wumpus-cave.net/post/2022/06/2022-06-06-how-to-write-regexes-that-are-almost-readable/index.html
At my company we store our regex in the database with linebreaks in it, but when it's actually called to be used those line breaks are stripped out. That way regex that looks for X can all be all on one line and actually readable.
wait... why do you have so many regexes you need to put them in a database???
My job is regex.
Ummmmmmmm
The comments flag needs more support.