I’m saying if your use case makes regex the best option, you’ve gone the wrong way and should turn back. There are definitely corners you can paint yourself into that make it the way to go, but you’ve ended up there through a series of bad ideas.
Turns out the million hours of coding put into SQL, makes it a better option than regex, even for xml based files.
If you’re needing that level of complexity in a text file search, you already fucked up by putting the data in a text file. There’s a reason data file formats exist.
Never debug regex, just generate a new one. It’s not worth the hassle to figure out not only what it does, but what it was meant to do.
Better yet, just write it out in code, and never use regex. Tis a stupid thing that never should have been made.
So your use cases for regex are when you’re not going to actually fix the problem that caused you to need regex?