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Ask HN: Why isn't there a widely accepted replacement for regular expressions?

2 points by mshenfield ↗ HN
They're notoriously difficult to understand, and there have been lots of attempts to support alternatives that are more human readable (these examples include alternatives and Regex wrappers):

* https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions

* https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse

* https://drup.github.io/2016/08/12/tyre/

3 comments

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PaulHoule
I think most people find them easy to understand compared to the alternative of writing the code as a state machine or writing it without using a state machine.
stephenr
They can be difficult to understand, particularly for inexperienced users.

That's more an indicator that the person should learn about regular expressions than anything.