this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!
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Regular expression magic.
A lot of ad networks have a pattern to the name or the window the advert appears in.
Using regular expression you can find just the adwindow and ignore the actual content.
Now what is regular expression? A wizard language.
ask any programmer about RE after 4 beers and watch the hate wash over their face.
I love regex, I'm not even gonna lie. To be fair, my expressions haven't been 50+ characters long, but still.
Regex absolutely has many great uses. The issue is people trying to use for things they shouldn't. Then it suddenly becomes a nightmare.
Can I parse [X]HTML with regex?
You can parse any plaintext with regex, but I would recommend using XPath for that use case, instead.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags :)
Same, I've never understood the hate. But then again I memorize based off of patterns and regex in my brain is just a pattern.
I used to play regex games online lol. I once wrote a pattern for work that was ~200 characters. I loved doing it lol.
Seems like an interesting way to learn. Do you remember any of them?
The first language I learned was Perl, so regex are very close to my heart. I'm also quite excitable when I drink (I'm a happy drunk), so ask me and I'll give you a very enthusiastic explanation while not noticing that you aren't interested in my detailed explanation and examples. Do it. I dare ya.
🍻
Zawinski’s second law - “Sometimes a person looks at a problem and says ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll use regular expressions’. And now they have two problems.”
Decade of c# game design under my belt, but never dealt with web scripting. Am I missing out?
You are missing out on headaches.