Licensing the Regular Expression.

Because you shouldn’t be adding a regular expression to a code base without a license. And those who have licenses generally know it’s a better idea not to use them.

A brief summary of typical disasters:

  • Parsing email or IP addresses
  • Replacing build time tokens
  • Rolling your own string interpolations
  • Validating a person’s name
  • Parsing a phone number
  • Validating a street number
  • Enforcing a zip code globally
  • Searching in a database for something in a live query
  • Parsing a date or a time
  • Basically almost always outside of command line or ad-hoc query fu