Regular expressions are super-powerful, and can be friggin’ awesome. But for some reason, I just cannot bend my mind around them. I get lost right around the time that a regex gets to this point: /^[/. My mind immediately says, different language being spoken here, stop reading right now. I dunno why I have such a mental block about regexes, but at least I am not alone!
I’ve been looking at howtos and tutorials and primers to help me get over my problems with regular expressions. Some have helped, most have not. I learn by doing, not by reading, so there wasn’t much chance of that working, anyway.
But I just came across this awesome Regular Expression Tester. While teaching people how to create regexes isn’t really the goal of this tool, it definitely helped me to do that. Being able to see the structure of a regex and to play with the various sections helped things click for me. I’m still a regex beginner, but at least I’ve finally passed outside of n00b-ness.
