I have to use a ton of regex in my new job (plz save me), and I use ChatGPT for all of it. My job would be 10x harder if it wasn’t for ChatGPT. It provides extremely detailed examples and warns you of situations where the regex may not perform as expected. Seriously, try it out.
I have yet to see a regex that is so complicated that I would need some help. I expect programmers to know how to use regexes but it seems that it’s not the case. And when it becomes too big, you always can write verbose regexes with comments, it’s even easier. If someone could show me something too difficult for a human being (excluding the regex to validate emails), I’m interested.
It’s often developers who never took a finite automata class who I’ve seen struggle with regular expressions.
It’s kind of like writing code in C while not understanding how memory management works
Huh. That class looked hard as hell, I didn’t take it, and now I’m 2 years out of school still googling regex every time I need it.
Maybe I should do some reading 😅
It’s not that I’m incapable of evaluating regex, but rather the mental burden of evaluating complex regex statements and determining their purpose can be time-consuming. Why take 20 minutes to understand some regex when ChatGPT can do it in 20 seconds?
Thanks for this post, I use regex a often and did not know gpt would be good at this…
That’s the problem. It will confidently give you an correct sounding answer.
If it is actually true is a different topic. So don’t just blindly trust it. Verify, or at least sanity check it.
If you think regex is the hard part of programming, then you’re in for a bad time.
I often need to deal with half a dozen different programming languages in any day/week and the context switching can be difficult at times. When you’ve spent all day switching between JavaScript, Python, and YAML and suddenly need to draft some Regex, tools like ChatGPT can help immensely at reducing the mental burden of switching gears.
Just make sure to test the regex instead of blindly slapping it in assuming it works 🙂
The new Code Interpreter plugin that went live for this week for Plus users can actually execute Python code on a sandboxed environment. This allows you to add “Write and execute tests for the regex” to the end of your prompt.
What if I say “it’s probably okay just this one time” before I do it every time?
