How important is knowing Regexs?

Question

My personal experience is that regexs solve problems that can\'t be efficiently solved any other way, and are so frequently required in a world where strings are as important as

Answer 1

I find it very useful to know regular expressions. They are a very powerful tool, and in my opinion there are problems that you simply can't solve without these.

I would however not take regular expressions as a killing criterion for "hiring you as a senior programmer". They are like the wealth of other tools in the world. You should really known them in a problem domain where you need them, but you cannot presume that someone already knows all of these.

"a junior is always allowed the leeway of training"

If a senior isn't, then I would not hire him!

To the ones that argue how complex and unreadable a regular expression is: If the regexp solution to a problem is complex and unreadable, then probably the problem itself is! Good luck in solving it in an other way...