I was coming in a dose of excitement going through all the Javascript, improving my programming logic, but when it arrived at Regex I stopped, regex is something I never understood very well and in the first lessons I understood it well, only after that it was getting more and more complex. I confess that I even “cheated” and saw the answer to be able to jump out of a challenge, something I hadn’t done before.
A friend recommended me to skip the Regex to keep me motivated since it is not used much.
If “good at regex” is going to be the measure of a good coder, then I suspect there are a lot fewer good coders in the world than we thought.
A lot of people struggle with regex, especially me. But it is very powerful and insanely useful from time to time. If I need it, I often try to google to see if someone has build a similar regex and then hop on a regex playground to make it work. But it’s a struggle.
Like ieahleen says, just work through the challenges. Know that you won’t remember everything - that’s fine. Just know what is there and try to use it when you can. I’m sure there are some youtube videos that would help. Even messing around in the playground can be instructive.
You don’t need to know it super well yet. But it’s helpful to know what it is for now, and helpful to know how to use it for simple pattern matching.
You’re going to come across certain problems in the future that RegEx will come in extremely helpful for. And when you come across those problems, you’re going to realize “oh so that’s why RegEx exists!”
RegEx is one of those things where if you didn’t know about it, you’d basically be trying to reinvent the wheel, but since you’re going to know about it, it’ll be a huge timesaver and stress reducer.
One of the most common use cases for RegEx is pattern matching against email addresses to make sure they’re written in a valid format. Because sometimes either people make writing mistakes, or you get “hackers” trying to code their way into your system.
