Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven't touched it in like a year.

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 12 points 1 day ago (7 children)

You always forget regex syntax?

I've always found it simple to understand and remember. Even over many years and decades, I've never had issues reading or writing simple regex syntax (excluding the flags and shorthands) even after long regex breaks.

[–] Akito@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 day ago (6 children)

It's not about the syntax itself, it's about which syntax to use. There are different ones and remembering which one is for which language is tough.

[–] Lehmanator@programming.dev 2 points 14 hours ago

This is exactly it. Regex is super simple. The difficulty is maintaining a mental mapping between language/util <-> regex engine <-> engine syntax & character class names. It gets worse when utils also conditionally enable extended syntaxes with flags or options.

The hardest part is remembering whether you need to use \w or [:alnum:].

Way too few utils actually mention which syntax they use too. Most just say something accepts a "regular expression", which is totally ambiguous.

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