Making Sense of Regular Expressions

Do you tend to avoid complex regular expressions — even if you’re a competent Perl programmer — because they appear to be indecipherable by mere mortals? I’ll try to make some sense of it all… or maybe just confuse you even further!

This will be an updated version of my talk from TPC 2018, demonstrating how to take a complex regular expression that may incomprehensible and methodically break it down into smaller parts that are easier to understand, then building up the understanding of the full regular expression from those parts.

I have been programming Perl for over 33 years and regular expressions for over 35 years.