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.
Also works for cron jobs, shell scripts, SQL queries, HTML layouts and the odd mermaid diagram
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.
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
😂 If I could summarize my engineering career, that would be the one liner.