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Let's remind the famous quote from Jamie Zawinski: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

I was neglecting this quote for a long time, until I started using regular expressions in real projects...

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I never really learned how to write regex. I can write simple ones with the use of a tool to help me figure out what I need to write (and a cheatsheet to explain the terms).

I realize they could save me some future potential grief, but I'm usually more concerned with the present actual grief they cause me.

I feel like I'm letting down the side.

If you start writing a lot of Unix pipelines or use Vim extensively you start to get a very strong working knowledge of regular expressions (awk can solve basically any problem, but it creates at least twice as many as it solves :P).

So many routing solutions use regexes. Is that really necessary?

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