Question

Are there particular cases where native text manipulation is more desirable than regex?
In particular .net?

Note:
Regex appears to be a highly emotive subject, so I am wary of asking such a question. This question is not inviting personal/profession opinions on regex, only specific situations where a solution including its use is not as good as language native commands (including those which have underlying code using regex) and why.

Also, note that Desirable can mean performance, can mean code-readability; it does not mean panacea, as each solution for a problem has its benefits and limitations.

Apologies if this is a duplicate, I have searched SO for a similar question.

Answer 1

When you can do it simply with native text manipulation, it is usually preferable (simpler to read & better performance) not to use regex.

Personal rule of thumb: if it’s tricky or relatively longer to do it “manually” and that performance gain is negligible, don’t. Else do.

Don’t examples:

• split
• simple find & replace
• long text
• loop
• existing native functions (like, in PHP, strrchr, ucwords…)