Ooh i really liked your tool,why don't you make more like this?

Thanks brother.. i hate regex too..nice share for people like us

Well if you say it sucks it probably sucks right???😂😂

Thanks for sharing...me to hate regex

Where does all this hate for Regex come from?? I never thought it was complicated and learning it can be done within a few hours.

Great thing that you came up with something this useful when a lot of people still hate all the complexities behind regex. So, does ihateregex help to generate regular expressions with a set of strings?

bookmarked

🤩 This is awesome!
How can I contribute more builtin patterns?

according to your regex, this is a valid emailaddress: geon@ihate@regex.io

Thank you <3

Nice service, Regex works nicely on simple things.
Thanks for the link - you deserve at least a Github * for your efforts.

Love regex, it's honestly not so bad, go to regextester and write some tests, besides, regex can be used in any language 😍

Great tool, bookmarked! ⚡

Really useful app ! Thanks ;)

You really did a great job at self-improvement here, even if it wasn't your intention at first! :)

Take a problem, solve it and overcome it.
What I like especially about your site is that you are greeted with a couple of popular choices and just a searchbox to get started. On other sites I always find myself getting lost in information like tips, setting options, understanding different flags and stuff that is visible right after loading the page.
The clean UI helps to stay focused on getting the regex and leaving again.

The main problem with regex is that they overused.

For simple problems, regex are not needed, you have simpler, more readable solutions.

A combinaison of split(), subString(), removePrefix(), removeSuffix() is usually enough.

For complex problems, regex are not good at all.

Do not use a regex try to parse email, or URL, or HTML, ...

If the regex is not trivial, do not use a regex.

My advice:

Have a rule for pull requests that insists that every regex must come with a unit test that includes input that the regex is supposed to match and the ones that it's supposed to reject.

Nice. Did you use something like github.com/CJex/regulex ?

This is a nice, clean resource, with a great little graphical description system. I like it.
It's different to all the other regex pages because they're geared around you typing things in and testing them, where this is a "tl;dr" of sorts.

I don't understand why people don't like regex though. It's kind of like saying you don't like arrays.

Many people forget that you can use multiple regex pattern for one input. While everybody knows that a function for everything is bad and you should write one function for one purpose, everybody still writes regexes that include everything in one command. Maybe it's time to write an article on encapsulation of regex?

lol

phone numbers are a good example
for a simple validation I don't need a regex
for a bullet proof, you shouldn't use a regex either, you should send a SMS to the number via twilio and ask for the confirmation code

You should totally add it to Tiny Helpers ;)

This is great, I hate regex too!

No regex can validate that a phone number is valid.

The phone number 0049234523453452 does not exist, how do you know it?

Sending a SMS - or calling a landline, Twilio can do that as well - is the only reliable method.
Same for emails, sending an email and waiting for the user to click is the only reliable method.

To pre-validate, you can keep it simple like this:

fun main() {
    val emails = listOf("john@example.com", "John Doe")
    emails.forEach { println("input=$it isEmail=${it.isEmail()}")}
    // input=john@example.com isEmail=true
    // input=John Doe isEmail=false

    val phones = listOf(" 5555555555 ", "+1 (555) 555-5555", "555 - 555 - 5555", "invalid")
    phones.forEach { println(it.normalizePhoneNumber()) }
    // 5555555555
    // 15555555555
    // 5555555555
    // null
}

fun String.isEmail(): Boolean = 
    length > 6 && contains("@")

fun String.normalizePhoneNumber(): String? =
    this.filter { it.isDigit() }.takeIf { it.length > 6 }

@bpedroza
You have a good point, which will allow me to refine my position.

I think that we should stop over focusing on the HOW you did the pattern matching part (oh see, a nice regex! let me make it even better) and focus more on the WHAT it's supposed to do and WHY it's important.

Having the unit tests for the regex allows to reframe the question this way.
Then it's an implementation detail whether you use a regex or a parsing library or whatever, and I am fine with all of those solutions.

Awesome, having the diagrams and cheatsheet right there is very helpful. It will be much easier to figure out how to customize it and learn something along the way. Great work!

Delightful tool. Bookmarking!

I also hate regex, so much that I'm helping design an expression parser that addressees many of its flaws. This new parser won't replace regex — trying to be everything to everyone is how it came to be so annoyingly esoteric to begin with — but it'll hopefully be better than what we have for a number of common cases.

Hey Geon, cool project. Pretty sure it'll be handy to many.

Even the other day at work we were talking about how clueless we are about regex.
I'll do share it with them.

Awesome work!

I don't particularly hate Regex's but I hate getting them right!

I have used this online tool (No connections to the site) regex101.com/ for a few years as something to test and help at least validate the cRaZyNeSs that sometimes happen when you "over do it" with Regex's

Keep up the great work!

Sandy

oooohhhh, I will defintely take a look at this. I hate regex also and the visuals you are providing will definitely help me debug my expressions

I have been a programmer for over a quarter of a century. And I used to think that I would never "get" regular expressions. Then one day about 6 or 7 years ago I realized I could write regular expressions correct about 80% of the time, after which it occurred to me that I now "get" regex. What changed?

I started using PhpStorm (or any JetBrain's IDE) and forced myself to use regular expressions to do search and replace. Because of how their UI works — it includes a preview of the result for each occurence when it asks if okay to replace — it basically trained me to grok regex.

So, trying to learn regular expressions only when you need to use one in your code will, if you are like me, leave you forever unable to become one with regex. But if you would like to learn the 20% of regex like the back of your hand that you'll use 80% of the time, grabbing a JetBrain's IDE (or maybe some other IDEs or text editors) and forcing yourself to use regex on almost every search is really all it takes.

#jmtcw

Awesome!

Yes, it was for a couple of minutes. It's back online :)
Don't know what happened

One of the things about regexes is that they are (generally) not regular in two senses of the word:

1) they have different syntax for perl/PCRE, Python, Emacs, Vim, ...;
2) they are not regular in the linguistic/CompSci sense of the "regular languages", and even when they are, backtracking parsers are (almost always) used on them and this can lead to denial-of-service bugs :(

Nice job - love it!

Regular expressions are extremely useful in (ad hoc) scripts and sometimes in search-replace operations in text editors (also for pure search to become more specific (fewer false positives)).

Typically one-off scripts to extract and output information from line-oriented input (even HTML). They don't need to be robust and are (usually) not maintained. They get the job done quickly and efficiently.

I like regex. I hate when people invent weird custom 'subsets' of regexp, instead of using this thing that works well. (albeit, I agree: it's not very readable. Free space regex with comments solves that, though.)

This is awesome @geongeorge ! Thank you!

Wow, this is great. Thanks man!