Like Adam said, is there anything better? I shudder to think of trying to do a bunch of strcmp operations instead of a good regex. Like any expressive language it is possible to abuse the regex and make very unreadable constructs, but often even a seemingly unreadable regex makes much more sense than the equivalent procedural code to achieve the same thing.
Without the regex, you'd have to write your own routine to parse, backtrack, compare, store indexes, make substitutions, and manage all the results. Regex gives you all that in a very expressive form. I don't like to repeat code, but if I had to code my own parser every time I needed to look for a moderately complex pattern... I don't know what I'd do.
Yes there are different flavors of regex, but most the most popular ones are very similar, and whatever language you are using them in usually has documentation to help you read it.
