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.

  • Thomas@lemmy.douwes.co.uk
    3·
    1 year ago

    wow, I’m impressed, I can’t even understand some of the silly regex’s I have. It printed an entire explanation of how the regex worked

      • varsockOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        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

  • nibblebitA
    3·
    1 year ago

    Also works for cron jobs, shell scripts, SQL queries, HTML layouts and the odd mermaid diagram

    • varsockOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yeah totally! I would encourage everyone to try it with their workflow and see where it can make a difference and where it falls short.

      Reason I made an example out of regex is b/c of how much hate it gets :D I definitely see why regex is widely appreciated.

      • nibblebitA
        4·
        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

        • varsockOPEnglish
          4·
          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.