this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025

889 points (98.5% liked)

Programmer Humor

20717 readers

1804 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

Keep content in english
No advertisements
Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

889

what debugging regex feels like (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/programmer_humor

73 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Elisp has a nice notation for maintainably composing regexes like any other programming expression. Only language I've seen offer that. So instead of "/\\*\\(?:[^*]\\|\\*[^/]\\)*\\*+/", the regular expression to match C block comments could be expressed (with inline comments)

(rx "/*"                          ; Initial /*
    (zero-or-more
     (or (not (any "*"))          ;  Either non-*,
         (seq "*"                 ;  or * followed by
              (not (any "/")))))  ;  non-/
    (one-or-more "*")             ; At least one star,
    "/")                          ; and the final /