This has been an interesting week. I've been working on the implementation of IDataReader and IEnumerable for a couple of classes in C#. The classes parse some complicated text files using regular expressions.
I've learned more about the .Net class that implements regex than I would care to know. (I am happy to have learned about the class.) I've also run into some minor cases where a regex I worked out in perl didn't work the same way in the Microsoft component. However, the MS component has many strong points that made implementing the parsing method simpler. This isn't a Microsoft bash, it's just there are some minor differences when it comes to handling /r/n sequences. (I was able to work around them without issue.) I can say that learning regular expressions is a requirement for programming. You can accomplish your parsing task without using regex, but you can't do it in six or seven lines of code. My advice is to obtain a regex editor and start learning.
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