Category:Regular Expressions

From Erlang Community

[edit] Introduction

Lisps and members of the Prolog family (like Erlang) in general are sort of famous for looking down on Regular Expressions. Other languages that lack Erlang's powerful pattern matching tend to fall back on regular expressions to provide some of that capability; one could argue that Regular Expressions have been badly overused. For example, any sort of pattern matching that involves stack-like matching (matching parentheses, quoted strings, etc.) is usually very difficult using regular expressions.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

-- Jamie Zawinski

Still, Regular Expressions are unbeatable for a lot of text processing tasks. Erlang provides built in regular expressions using the Unix egrep syntax.