@epidiah If the problem is "how to I find something specific in/from a string" then regex might be the solution, otherwise it's definitely not. More complicated than that and there's a good chance that there's an existing library around that will do what you want more easily anyways.
@epidiah I think regex is often a convenient solution, just not often a good one. If you’re looking for more nerdery to get into and haven’t done so yet, I’d suggest learning a bit about compiler design. I’ve found myself writing parsers for all sorts of things over the years, and the traditional recursive descent approach is pretty easy to crank out from scratch, particularly if you have a grammar handy.
@epidiah You have 3 now.
1: The original problem
2: Figuring out the regex
3: Later, realizing your regex was not specific enough, and need to figure out what else it affected.