Ever since I learned regular expressions, they have been one of my most beloved features of any language, especially Python. I know lots of people just cringe at the thought of having to sit down for 30 minutes to hash out a 40 character pattern, but it's too powerful to pass up. Up until recently, my process was just to think the problem through and slowly work up the pattern until I got something that worked. Debugging consisted of merely pulling pieces out and trying them individually. That was until I discovered the hidden Python regex debugging feature a couple weeks ago on Stack Overflow, thanks to BatchyX.
Posted by brutimus on October 28, 2008