Regular expressions are hard, let's go shopping

jgc.org

33 points·jgrahamc··10 comments

I'm sorry but I seem to be missing the deeper point here; the post pretty much looks like a two-page description of a PHP plugin coder forgetting to put [&\?] in a regexp. Please explain!

it's a two page blog post. let's go shopping!

Am I the only one tired of the "Let's go shopping" meme?

No. Though the "meme" meme isn't too far behind. :-) Seems to me that "let's go shopping" is merely an expression or a figure of speech.

there's a plugin for WordPress (that hasn't been updated for years) that's intended to highlight search terms when the visitor comes from a search engine

This functionality is wrong in and of itself, broken or not. I am sick of sites which highlight my Google search terms. I already KNOW what I was searching for, you don't have to tell me! I can search within the page if I have trouble finding it - though these pages often also sabotage my efforts by also displaying the search term somewhere. Just show me what your page actually looks like. Do you think that because I found a summary of the page on Google and clicked through that perhaps you should show me a ... different page.

That misfeature infuriates me in Trac, partly because the highlighting is fucking neon

Wordpress and its ecosystem have such exceedingly great code quality. :/

Automatic tests take too much time to write. I tested it in the browser and it worked fine!

What do you mean it didn't work when you tried it? It works on my machine just fine, you must be doing something wrong. Noob.

Quantity has a quality all its own. In particular, it means someone else suffers fixing the bug so you don't have to.

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