Regex gets a bad reputation for being very complex. That’s fair, but I also think that if you focus on a certain core subset of regex, it’s not that hard. Most of the complexity comes from various “shortcuts” that are hard to remember. If you ignore those, the language itself is fairly small and portable across programming languages.

It’s worth knowing regex because you can get A LOT done in very little code. If I try to replicate what my regex does using normal procedural code, it’s often very verbose, buggy and significantly slower. It often takes hours or days to do better than a couple minutes of writing regex.

source: L