Step Up Your Game with Weekly Regular Expression Challenges
People seem to have strong opinions about regular expressions. While some love them, others avoid using them at all costs. Personally, I enjoy writing them, which is why I want to point you to Regex Tuesday, a compelling way to improve your regular expression skills.
A Weekly Regular Expression Challenge #
Every Tuesday, Callum Macrae, the guy behind Regex Tuesday, releases a new challenge on the GitHub project page. There, he describes the project as follows:
Regex Tuesday is the day where everyone writes regex for a day! Every Tuesday, I will push a new challenge to this website. They can be easy or tricky, and there is sure to be a variety of different challenges available.
Depending on the problem, you have to come up with a regular expression that either matches a given selection of the input strings or correctly replaces parts of each string. You're given a bunch of test cases for each problem and try to get as many of them as you can to pass.
Examples of Challenge Problems #
At the time of writing, past challenges included ...
- highlighting repeated words,
- matching CSS grayscale colors,
- matching dates,
- parsing italic Markdown,
- matching numbers,
- matching IPv4 addresses, and
- matching domain names.
Some of the challenges are harder to solve than others, and since I'm far from being a regular expression expert myself, it took me some time and thought to come up with a solution. (Yes, I'm talking about you, Markdown!)
If you want to save your solutions to the challenges or share them with others, you can also generate a permalink containing your regular expression.
Keep Practicing with Your Tools #
Regular expressions are one of many tools in a programmer's toolbox. They're definitely not the solution to all problems, but they do have their uses. Like a hammer, they're not useful for cutting down trees; for that, you need an axe. When faced with a nail, though, knowing how to use a hammer comes in handy. So I encourage you to keep improving your regular expression skills and tackle the first week's Regex Tuesday challenge!