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

I see regex as a fast, readable and preferable way to perform pattern matching on string data. So many languages support regex for this reason. If you wanted to write string manipulation code to match say, a Canadian zip code, be my guest, but the regex equivalent is so much more succinct. Definitely worth it.