Regex Explained
What happens
- A developer stands at a whiteboard covered in a long regular expression and starts: "Now, this part of the regex..."
- A piece of the expression breaks loose and attacks him. "Oops!"
- He bends down to pick up the pieces: "Sorry, bad capture group."
- Back at the board, the regex has turned into a row of emoji and symbols. "Now where was I... God damn it!!!"
Why it lands
Regular expressions are dense enough that explaining one often changes it. The hover text puts it as a law: how long you can follow a regex is inversely proportional to the square of its capture groups.
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