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

True, learning to decipher regexes is difficult -- but so is learning to decipher the hosting program code in the first place. But is that so difficult, that we would rather write out manual instruction for a person to perform? No -- because that would be ridiculously longer and complicated. Same thing for not using a properly-formed regex.