Regex Isn't Hard (2023)

So my brother doesn't code for a living, but has done a fair amount of personal coding, and also gotten into the habit of watching live-coding sessions on YouTube. Recently he's gotten involved in my project a bit, and so we've done some pair programming sessions, in part to get him up to speed on the codebase, in part to get him up to speed on more industrial-grade coding practices and workflows.

At some point we needed to do some parsing of some strings, and I suggested a simple regex. But apparently a bunch of the streamers he's been watching basically have this attitude that regexes stink, and you should use basically anything else. So we had a conversation, and compared the clarity of coding up the relatively simple regex I'd made, with how you'd have to do it procedurally; I think the regex was a clear winner.

Obviously regexes aren't the right tool for every job, and they can certainly be done poorly; but in the right place at the right time they're the simplest, most robust, easiest to understand solution to the problem.

My problem is that regexes are write-only, unreadable once written (to me anyway). And sometimes they do more than you intended. You maybe tested on a few inputs and declared it fit for purpose, but there might be more inputs upon which it has unintended effects. I don't mind simple, straight-forward regexes. But when they become more complex, I tend to prefer to write out the procedural code, even if it is (much) longer in terms of lines. I find that generally I can read code better than regexes, and that code I write is more predictable than regexes I write.

What makes them unreadable to you ? 99% of the time you can just read them character by character with maybe some groups and back references