Regex are dreaded as difficult to comprehend, but the real danger in using them is more subtle - especially nowadays when you'd have most text as UTF-8, possibly escaped, etc. and regex are prone to misbehave in odd ways, and introduce security issues - they should only be handled by expert programmers. Even parsing apparently simple stuff like email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers and date/time is tricky, far beyond what a newbie would expect. There's a reason we have dedicated validation functions in PHP for all of the above. That said, regex have their use case too, and if your parsing case is not covered by a dedicated function, are usually the best option.