Hello *waves*
The only thing regexp has on the plus side is that it's compact. I'd prefer something that's more readable without knowledge. I know how to use it but I always have to google it. I only use it once per year and so there's no big win in mesmerizing it.
. * | + ? ( )
Character classes can often be given as ranges:
[a-z] [A-Z] [0-9] ^ $
Lazy matching finds the shortest matching string instead of the longest one. This is given by the symbols:
*? +?
> I only use it once per year
If you use a text editor, any kind of repetitive find+replace activity can be sped up using regexes. Seems strange you only use it once per year.
Some people tell you that you can't parse XML using regexes. THEY'RE WR- right, but you can often do decent one-off jobs on an XML document using regular expressions, as long as you're aware that it's a one-off job that won't work on any other document.
^(?=.\d)(?=.[a-z])(?=.[A-Z])(?=.[!@#$^&()_-]).{8,18}$
That is hard to quickly* read and understand what it is. Sure a comment would help, but if someone said it isn't working, I have to work all that out and then fix it.
There is a reason Perl lost to Python. It just seems like we can do better.