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.
Explaining regexs is definitely more of a strength than writing!
Complex regexs require more human intervention or better “prompt engineering” for sure.
I like to build up a regex by “show me a regex that does this. Add to the previous regex to also look for this. Modify previous regex to exclude this, etc etc.” That way I can walk Chat-GPT by the hand on what I want. dumping a whole prompt on it gives me poor results