The article starts with the famous quote by Jamie Zawinski:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular
expressions.’ Now they have two problems.
It then goes on to discuss the perils of regular expressions, when they encounter unanticipated data and run into catastrophic backtracking because of greedy expressions.
>... there's a bit more to the story than that, as evidenced by Jeffrey Friedl's exhaustive research on the Zawinski quote. Zawinski himself commented on it. Analyzing the full text of Jamie's posts in the original 1997 thread, we find the following:
>Perl's nature encourages the use of regular expressions almost to the exclusion of all other techniques; they are far and away the most "obvious" (at least, to people who don't know any better) way to get from point A to point B.
>The first quote is too glib to be taken seriously. But this, I completely agree with. Here's the point Jamie was trying to make: not that regular expressions are evil, per se, but that overuse of regular expressions is evil.
>Perl's nature encourages the use of regular expressions almost to the exclusion of all other techniques
I like Perl, but that is true. Despite the pretty rich set of built-ins, for example, there's not a top-level string replace function. You have to roll your own with index and substr.
The article is short and to the point.