"The Insanity Of Linux's Regular Expressions " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys7yUyyQA-Y
All in all, my life would be miserable if I would not have regexp available in grep/sed/editor/ide/java/python, their usefulness trump any such inconveniences.
does anyone know of any?
What are your current issues or what limitations have you ran into?
And speaking of ffmpeg, or tooling in general, I tend to make notes. After a while you end up with a pretty decent curated reference.
In one tool you’ll use + to match one or more times, and \+ to mean literal plus sign.
In another tool you’ll use \+ to match one or more time, and + to mean literal plus sign.
In one tool you’ll use ( and ) to create a match group, and \( and \) to mean literal open and close parentheses.
In another tool you’ll use \( and \) to create a match group, and ( and ) to mean literal open and close parentheses.
This is basically the only problem I have when writing regexes, for the kinds of regexes I write.
Also, one thing that’s not a problem per se but something that leads me to write my regexes with more characters than strictly necessary is that I rarely use shorthand for groups of characters. For example the tool might have a shorthand for digit but I always write [0-9] when I need to match a digit. Also probably because the shorthand might or might not be different for different tools.
Regexes are also known to be “write once read never”, in that writing a regex is relatively easy, but revisiting a semi-complicated regex you or someone else wrote in the past takes a little bit of extra effort to figure out what it’s matching and what edits one should make to it. In this case, tools like https://regex101.com/ or https://www.debuggex.com/ help a lot.
They're both tools where if they're part of your daily workflow you'll get immense value out of learning them thoroughly. If instead you need a regex once or twice a week, the benefit is not greater than the cost of learning to do it myself. I have a hundred other equally complicated things to learn and remember, half the job of the computer is to know things I can't put in my brain. If it can do the regex for me, I suddenly get 70% of the value at no cost.
Regex is not a tool I need often enough to justify the hours and brain space. But it is still an indespensible tool. So when I need a regex, I either ask a human wizard I know, or now I ask my computer directly.
My kid uses wifi, google classroom tools, youtube, games,... I can tell him if only you knew command.com, ipconfig, doom.wad formats, lateg,... you could be so much more proficient. I already know this will never happen, just like I never learned x86 assembly.
The same goes for tools like LLMs, once you are used to them, your knowledge shifts.