The first time I ever encountered a regular expression was many years ago now, but I still remember my first thoughts on it: What is this string-like thing? I don’t want to touch it, it looks scary. I don’t remember quite what that regex was doing, or how exactly it looked like, but it scared me to death. In hindsight, I now realize that it wasn’t actually that scary after all. In face, it was an easy way to solve the problem in hand. But why did I ever feel this way? It’s just the awkwardness of the syntax, they certainly…

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