Are regular expressions worth the hassle?

Question

It strikes me that regular expressions are not understood well by the majority of developers. It also strikes me that for a lot of problems where regular expressions are use

Answer 1

Maintaining one regular expression is a lot less effort than maintaining 20 lines of code. And you underestimate the amount of code needed - for a regex of any complexity, the replacement code could easily be 200 rather than 20 lines.