With all the strengths and shortcomings of Chat-GPT, I wanted to share one consistent strength I found it has when working with regex.

  • You can ask it to generate regex patterns for known and custom things.
    • If you are skeptical it is correct (like me), you can ask it to break down the pattern and inspect why the decisions were made. If I don’t understand some fields, I type up a quick test and make sure it covers all edge cases.
  • And my personal favorite, you can paste a regex and ask it to tell you what it matches to. No more writing regex and forgetting what they are for!

I don’t always have the opportunity to use regex when I work and would shy away from it because it can become illegible, but now that it is so easy I find I am slapping it everywhere and I cutting down on logic when sanitizing inputs/data. The bonus is now that I’m using it more, I am becoming less reliant on having it be generated for me.

  • nibblebitA
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    1 year ago

    Theres like a whole class of “Stuff you have to relearn every time you have to use it”: XPath, JMESPath, cron, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, PostScript etc… REGEX might be king of those :p

    • varsockOP
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      1 year ago

      Stuff you have to relearn every time you have to use it

      😂 If I could summarize my engineering career, that would be the one liner.