40 There Are Two Types of People: Regex Edition

There are two types of people: those who had a problem and used regex, and those who now have two problems.

There are two types of people: those who understand the regex they wrote, and those who wrote it six months ago.

There are two types of people: those who escaped the dot, and those matching every character and wondering why.

There are two types of people: those who use non-greedy matching, and those whose pattern ate the entire document.

There are two types of people: those who tested the regex, and those who shipped it and broke every email with a plus sign.

There are two types of people: those who parse HTML with a parser, and those who tried it with regex and summoned something.

There are two types of people: those who write a readable regex, and those who wrote 200 characters of line noise and called it done.

There are two types of people: those who comment their regex, and those who left a curse for future-you.

There are two types of people: those who anchor with ^ and $, and those matching in the middle of words by accident.

There are two types of people: those who finally got the regex working, and those who refuse to touch it ever again.

There are two types of people: those who write the regex, and those who copy it from Stack Overflow and pray.

There are two types of people: those who validate email with a simple pattern, and those who found the 6,000-character "correct" one and lost it.

There are two types of people: those who use a regex tester, and those debugging in production with real user data.

There are two types of people: those who use named groups, and those counting parentheses out loud.

There are two types of people: those who reached for regex, and those who realized a split would have done it.

There are two types of people: those who learned lookaheads, and those who pretend lookaheads do not exist.

There are two types of people: those who escaped the backslash, and those staring at four of them wondering how many they need.

There are two types of people: those who use word boundaries, and those matching "cat" inside "category" forever.

There are two types of people: those who know the difference between a digit class and \d, and those who used both in one pattern.

There are two types of people: those who set the right flags, and those wondering why it only matches the first line.

There are two types of people: those who break the regex into pieces, and those with one expression you can see from space.

There are two types of people: those who handle Unicode, and those whose pattern works until someone types an accent.

There are two types of people: those who reuse a tested pattern, and those who rewrite it slightly worse every time.

There are two types of people: those who guarded against catastrophic backtracking, and those who took the server down with one input.

There are two types of people: those who say "I'll just use regex," and those who said that yesterday.

There are two types of people: those who read the regex docs, and those guessing at syntax until something matches.

There are two types of people: those who match phone numbers loosely, and those building one pattern for all 200 countries at once.

There are two types of people: those who quoted the special characters, and those whose dot matched the whole input.

There are two types of people: those who test against the data, and those who tested against their hopes.

There are two types of people: those who keep the regex simple, and those who added a third lookbehind at 1 a.m.

There are two types of people: those who explain the pattern in a comment, and those who wrote "good luck."

There are two types of people: those who use a library for dates, and those parsing dates with regex and crying.

There are two types of people: those who escaped the slash in the URL pattern, and those whose regex ended early at the first one.

There are two types of people: those who use a whitespace class, and those who typed a literal space and missed all the tabs.

There are two types of people: those who write a test for the regex, and those who will find out from the support ticket.

There are two types of people: those who learned regex once, and those who relearn it every single time.

There are two types of people: those who can read a regex aloud, and those who go quiet and squint.

There are two types of people: those who know flavors differ, and those whose pattern works in JavaScript and dies in grep.

There are two types of people: those who tested the edge cases, and those whose regex works on the one example they had.

There are two types of people: those who matched what they meant, and those who matched everything and called it a feature.