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Wyrd Smythe's avatar

Good post. They say that, if you have a problem, and you solve with a regular expression, now you have two problems. That said, for all their challenge, they are powerful, and this is one situation where I might choose to use a (very well documented) regex. FWIW, I just posted a Note with some code using a regex to solve this.

The regex: ^ (\d+|\*) f (.*) (\d+|\*) l (.*) $

Spaces added for clarity. It says: starting at the beginning of the string there are either some digits OR the literal '*' followed by a literal 'f' followed by some characters followed by some digits OR the literal '*' followed by a literal 'l' followed by some characters to the end of the string. Clear as mud, right? :)

The Note with a working example:

https://substack.com/profile/195807185-wyrd-smythe/note/c-102034331

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Stephen Gruppetta's avatar

Indeed–and that's why I wanted to add a note in the article to point those brave enough to regex. You're absolutely right, despite their challenges, for situations such as this one, they're ideal!

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