Just make sure to test the regex instead of blindly slapping it in assuming it works π
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Iβve tried it and found it wanting at regex and excel formulas, but Iβm glad to hear itβs working for you! Are you using 4? I havenβt tried that one and I hear itβs better.
I typically try 3.5 first and switch to 4 if the results aren't great. 3.5 typically handles basic use cases quite well, for example, writing regex that detects jira ticket naming nomenclature. For more complex things, I go to 4.
It sometimes gets things wrong, but I've also found that just saying "that didn't work" gets it to reevaluate for more complex situations
it helps if you hold ChatGPTs hand and walk it through what you need. For example if you have a regex with 3 requirements, ask it to write a regex for the first requirement, then ask it to modify the previous output to add another requirement, and so on. that way you can sort of "audit" it as it generates the correct regex.
there is some more discussion of this in a similar post from a few days ago.
So I was trying to write a regex for use with my ChatGPT discord bot. I wanted to trim off any final partial sentence at the end. I went around and around with it for a couple of hours because look ahead and look behind are just not something I do often enough.
It kept writing more and more complicated regex that didnβt work. The final solution, while not exactly perfect - it wonβt keep a quote at the end of a sentence, and honorifics like Mr. and Dr. throw it - it wasnβt nearly as complicated as ChatGPT was making it. It still never did give me anything working - I just fucked around on regex101 until I got it right. As usual but having wasted 90 minutes or so.
You can improve the reliability if you provide it test cases. You can now be the PM you wish you had for the robot that will eventually replace you.
I hated everything about this comment, thanks.
Also curious. If I had some AI help with regex that would be awesome. But I felt as you said it wouldnβt work great without 4. Which I donβt have.
If you think regex is the hard part of programming, then you're in for a bad time.
I often need to deal with half a dozen different programming languages in any day/week and the context switching can be difficult at times. When you've spent all day switching between JavaScript, Python, and YAML and suddenly need to draft some Regex, tools like ChatGPT can help immensely at reducing the mental burden of switching gears.
The syntax of regular regexes is the same across languages though. It's just the regex library which is different, but so is every other library between languages.
If the project is less than a thousand lines of code in a language with a garbage collector, it probably is. Most other problems don't require learning a DSL to handle them, and most other DSL's aren't nearly as terse.
"i have this problem I know what I'll do! I'll use regex to fix it!"
Uses regex.
"Yay problem is now fixed it works!"
Now has 2 problems.
totally!!!
My biggest problem with it has been that it doesn't necessarily understand that some things are impossible - for example, variable-length lookbehinds.
That depends on the regex flavor. Some of them have full support for variable length lookbehinds, for example JavaScript and third-party regex module for Python.
You can also ask it to do write VBA code for Excel, or Jira queries.
Still a bit new to Jira, what are Jira queries?
Typically called JQL, it's a simple query language to find info. For example, there's a simple query to find epics with a particular affects version and/or fix version, or return epics that are missing information in a particular field.
The default or basic Jira can't do some things though. Like I haven't been able to get the total number of story points from issues within an epic. I think you need a 3rd party plugin for that.
That's nice to know, hopefully I can bring that up during our sprint planning sessions when necessary.
I have yet to see a regex that is so complicated that I would need some help. I expect programmers to know how to use regexes but it seems that it's not the case. And when it becomes too big, you always can write verbose regexes with comments, it's even easier. If someone could show me something too difficult for a human being (excluding the regex to validate emails), I'm interested.
It's often developers who never took a finite automata class who I've seen struggle with regular expressions.
It's kind of like writing code in C while not understanding how memory management works
Huh. That class looked hard as hell, I didn't take it, and now I'm 2 years out of school still googling regex every time I need it.
Maybe I should do some reading π
It was mandatory. I'm glad I took it, but I'm glad it's over πππ
Just look up how finite automatas work. You don't need to understand turing machines or turing completeness
Regex isn't difficult, just annoying to ensure it is bug-free. If ChatGPT can help, then I don't know why you wouldn't be in favor of it
It's not that I'm incapable of evaluating regex, but rather the mental burden of evaluating complex regex statements and determining their purpose can be time-consuming. Why take 20 minutes to understand some regex when ChatGPT can do it in 20 seconds?
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