It's not that I don't know them, it's that only idiots roll their own instead of using libraries. Every time I see a regex cleaning strings I instantly know th

It's not that I don't know them, it's that only idiots roll their own instead of using libraries. Every time I see a regex cleaning strings I instantly know the app was written by an ametuer and probably horrible and full of security issues. Oh it globally replaces this bad token but not recursively? Great I use regex for searching logs all the time but never in production apps. I can write some pretty mean regex but I can't remember the function call for string replace off the top of my head. For me regex is 99% in a text editor. Really when do you split up strings without using a tokenizer or parser of some sort? Manual string manipulation is usually dumb and error prone. The only time I find myself doing it is when stuffing crap into bobs "extras" db field which is actually a bunch of 80 char strings delimited by the pipe character.