#regex is one of those things for which I never really took the time to properly understand it. I've always found myself to resort to applying and tweaking existing examples. You know, the programming-as-stackoverflow-searches-approach.
Yesterday's 3 hour rabbit hole trying to get things working without having a good grasp reminded me once again of the folly of that approach. Any good sources you could recommend for learning about regular expressions?
Python-specific is a +
@rra I'm sorry to say that, with regex, beyond a basic guide there's just no substitute for time in the repl fiddling with it.
@rra I usually use https://regexr.com which if you hover over each subsection explains what is happening with it.
@rra regexr.com is invaluable for me.
Flags etc requires a bit of further reading of the `re` module docs, but otherwise it's a godsend.
@rra not per se a learning page on regex, but I found (and still find - learning regex feels more like an open ended journey to me) https://regex101.com/ to be tremendously useful in the learning process, as the detailed and realtime visual feedback you get really allows you to get a more plastic feeling of how the very abstract instructions are applied by the regex engine
@rra The docs are good and recommend a book for further reading:
@rra
A quick howto
https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/regex
an extensive one (2 parts)
https://realpython.com/regex-python/
I visit both sites often for my python lessons and work.
HTH
@rra The thing that taught me regexps was learning and using vi as my main editor.
ha, so it seems the experimental method using a repl is the one which is most used. So what I was doing seems pretty sensible. However, thanks for the links to books etc. I think the experimental method will fare better with some more in-depth background knowledge!