• pmk@piefed.ca
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      14 hours ago

      To make things even more fun, regex differs in subtly different ways, the regex that works in perl might not work in sed. There are two main dialects, BRE and ERE, and lots of tool specific additions. So I find myself wondering if grep is using extended regular expressions, or is that in egrep, or is egrep the standard grep nowadays? One time I saw Russ Cox use Acme, and I saw the real power of regex when used by someone intuitively. But I am no Russ Cox.

      • Randelung@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        And then you might have to escape every escape character because it needs to go into a string first, making everything even more complex.

    • DaGeek247@fedia.io
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      17 hours ago

      I’d learn regex, but it looks like the kind of tool that programmers would shove into every single search function hole and expect everyone to know it even though it makes no sense for it to be there.

      • da_cow (she/her)@feddit.org
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        17 hours ago

        You can do surprisingly mich with just regex, but often enough there are better tools for a certain task. However if you want to do anything with bash, you will See Quite a lot of regex.