I have to use a ton of regex in my new job (plz save me), and I use ChatGPT for all of it. My job would be 10x harder if it wasn’t for ChatGPT. It provides extremely detailed examples and warns you of situations where the regex may not perform as expected. Seriously, try it out.
Just make sure to test the regex instead of blindly slapping it in assuming it works 🙂
The new Code Interpreter plugin that went live for this week for Plus users can actually execute Python code on a sandboxed environment. This allows you to add “Write and execute tests for the regex” to the end of your prompt.
Regex101 is a sandbox env specifically for Regex
“i have this problem I know what I’ll do! I’ll use regex to fix it!”
Uses regex.
“Yay problem is now fixed it works!”
Now has 2 problems.
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I have yet to see a regex that is so complicated that I would need some help. I expect programmers to know how to use regexes but it seems that it’s not the case. And when it becomes too big, you always can write verbose regexes with comments, it’s even easier. If someone could show me something too difficult for a human being (excluding the regex to validate emails), I’m interested.
It’s often developers who never took a finite automata class who I’ve seen struggle with regular expressions.
It’s kind of like writing code in C while not understanding how memory management works
Huh. That class looked hard as hell, I didn’t take it, and now I’m 2 years out of school still googling regex every time I need it.
Maybe I should do some reading 😅
It was mandatory. I’m glad I took it, but I’m glad it’s over 😂😂😂
Just look up how finite automatas work. You don’t need to understand turing machines or turing completeness
I tried it and naaah it’s not that great. Keeps giving a rule for sample text too, despite really making it clear that I want a more general one.
If you think regex is the hard part of programming, then you’re in for a bad time.
I often need to deal with half a dozen different programming languages in any day/week and the context switching can be difficult at times. When you’ve spent all day switching between JavaScript, Python, and YAML and suddenly need to draft some Regex, tools like ChatGPT can help immensely at reducing the mental burden of switching gears.
Thanks for this post, I use regex a often and did not know gpt would be good at this…
That’s the problem. It will confidently give you an correct sounding answer.
If it is actually true is a different topic. So don’t just blindly trust it. Verify, or at least sanity check it.