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 agree with pretty much everything said here, and just need to include the mandatory quip:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

(attributed to Jamie Zawinski)

Like most jokes, it contains a kernel of truth.