JCooney.NET

# Regular Expressions == Maintainence Problem? 7/1/2005 3:21 PM notgartner.com: Mitch Denny's Blog

# re: "So you've got a problem, and you've decided to solve it with Regular Expressions. Now you've got two problems." 7/1/2005 6:57 PM Darren Neimke

I'd love to know who "owns" that quote. First time I heard it was when Raymond Chen wrote in on Eric Gunnerson's blog a while back:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericgu/archive/2004/02/25/79909.aspx#80053

# re: "So you've got a problem, and you've decided to solve it with Regular Expressions. Now you've got two problems." 7/3/2005 6:03 PM Sean M

The original quote came from Jamie Zawinski (Who worked on Netscape)

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

Here is the original source:

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/marginal.html

# re: "So you've got a problem, and you've decided to solve it with Regular Expressions. Now you've got two problems." 7/28/2005 9:11 PM Mitch Denny

But what else would you use for a legitimate text processing question?