There are many problems with what I perceive to be countless dupes of low quality questions in the [regex]
tag. Rather than complaining about it, I've decided to take matters into my own hands.
I'm thinking that I should start a series of [regex]
articles.
I do fear retaliation from the community, accusation of rep-whoring, etc, so I decided that perhaps I should start with more advanced techniques that is rarely (if ever) covered before. If I get good feedback (by votes and comments), then I may eventually start to cover some of the basics, stuff that has already been covered no doubt dozens if not hundreds of times before (at that point it may become somewhat of a rep-whoring, since it's essentially dupes of many dupes, but I hope in putting together well-written articles with generic but carefully-chosen examples, we can link them from the tag info for good learning resources).
I'd like feedback from the community before I start to embark on this effort.
Why advanced first?
The advanced articles will most probably be original, i.e. not dupes, but at the same time may not be as useful to the general public as the basic articles. The problem with the basic articles, of course, is that they've already been covered at various corners of the [regex]
tag, but rarely (as far as I know) in a way that is comprehensive, self-containing, and aimed at being educational (instead of just writing an answer for the sake of getting votes/acceptances).
My reasoning for starting with advanced first is, like mentioned, to avoid accusation of rep-whoring. Once I've earned the community's trust, I'd then gradually move on to the basics.
The Go Ahead
OK, guys, I've decided to do this. I'm a bit busy right now so I'm not sure when I'll start, but probably within a week or so. Thanks for the feedback.
List of articles
I've started it.
- How does this regex find triangular numbers?
- How can we match a^n b^n with Java regex?
- How does this Java regex detect palindromes?
- How does this regex replacement reverse a string?
This is not part of the articles, but someone asked a very good inquisitive question, and my solution uses nested reference, so it's very much in line with the current series:
I'll appreciate all feedbacks and comments.
Unresolved questions
- Should we create a tag for this series and/or others? What should it be? Is it a meta tag?
[c++]
, so I may not be able to fully appreciate GMan's effort at a technical level, but I'll give it a try right now.+1
- Good idea. I'd love to learn more about regular expressions. Also, I'd love to help you in distributing/posting these articles if you like.