[nycbug-talk] A Question in Advance of the November Meeting on Regexes

[James E Keenan]

On the announce list I read:

"November 6 2013
Regular Expressions Fundamentals, Moe Nasser
...
This meeting will cover regex basics, and based on audience
participation, it may go well beyond."

So let me pose this question to Moe in advance:

I principally write software in Perl, so I am very familiar with regular 
expressions themselves.  Very occasionally, however, I have written 
command-line programs which pipe a string to 'sed' for pattern matching, 
and I've even used (or maintained) 'system' commands within Perl 
programs that involve piping to 'sed' or 'awk' for pattern matching.

Do you have any guidelines or rules of thumb for when you would use one 
language's regexes versus another's?

(There was one point several years ago when I benchmarked a use of Perl 
regexes versus sed regexes, but I don't think the results were conclusive.)

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan