A GPT 3.5 powered tool for generating regex (opens in new tab)

> chatGPT is pretty good at generating test cases for regex

I think this is the biggest part. Automatically generated test cases for regex will make verifying regex way easier.

Even better, when you come across some ridiculous unknown legacy regex you can ask for an explanation of it and for test cases to verify that explanation.

I used to work for a tech company which ran our incident management stack on Google Cloud. One day, our incident management tool was unavailable due to some billing issue.

Turns out, someone during the test phase set up a limit of $1/day usage, and nobody ever changed it. We'd just finally hit that limit.

What I'm saying is, this isn't an AI-only problem, but it's comforting to know it's already impacting AI-backed tools.

There are some neat tools for visualizing a regex like https://regexper.com/

It's not. I'll be the first one to link to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

It should be required reading before being allowed to write code that'll operate on user profiles, but there's no such thing as a programming license, so this link will have to do.

There is basically no regex to validate names except for maybe "is not an empty string".

It might be good to say what you want in natural language or have it come up with that from your goal.

A regex that worked for all names would be extremely weak. I can’t imagine it being much more than testing valid characters.

The regular version of ChatGPT can explain it pretty well. I asked it about your regex and it gave me a detailed breakdown; it's a bit too long to post it here but just to quote the [gimuy] part:

> [gimuy]{0,5}: This part of the pattern matches optional regex flags that can follow the closing forward slash of the regex pattern. The allowed flags are g (global), i (case-insensitive), m (multiline), u (unicode), and y (sticky). This part of the pattern matches zero to five of these flags, without repetition.

Full response: https://gist.github.com/nicolasff/3bbfb4cb8a514f58e140b887bf...

Respectfully, no. If you're trying to write a full blown language parser then regexps are the wrong tool, but a 50 line function doing the job of a regexp has a really funky code smell. Comment your regexps*, and use a parser when your usecase outgrows regexps, but a blanket ban on regexps smells of "I'm not smart enough to understand them".

* https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/regular-expressions-coo...

Unfortunately regex is the best we have. A bunch of if statements is also a whole less efficient and prone to errors than a regex statement. Once you start to learn regex, it actually isn't that bad. The challenging part is that a lot of people cut and paste not really understanding it and you end up with a bunch of bad regex examples.