Regular expressions are one of those things on the software development world that give me nausea when I come across them. Reading something like this in code just makes me shiver:
^(ht|f)tp(s?)\:\/\/[0-9a-zA-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*(:(0-9)*)*(\/?)([a-zA-Z0-9\-\.\?\,\’\/\\\+&%\$#_]*)?$
It seems to me like cartoon characters swearing: &$^%#&%@&$#**^&$. 
I just happened to run accross a little article (found at that taught something I didn’t know about regular expression: one can put comments on them!
So, instead of having some cryptic code like this one:
Regex regex = new Regex(@"^(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,10}\s$);
One could make the world a favor and rewrite that code like so:
Regex regex = new Regex(@"
^ # anchor at the start
(?=.*\d) # must contain at least one numeric character
(?=.*[a-z]) # must contain one lowercase character
(?=.*[A-Z]) # must contain one uppercase character
{8,10} # From 8 to 10 characters in length
\s # allows a space
$ # anchor at the end",
RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace);
^ # anchor at the start
(?=.*\d) # must contain at least one numeric character
(?=.*[a-z]) # must contain one lowercase character
(?=.*[A-Z]) # must contain one uppercase character
{8,10} # From 8 to 10 characters in length
\s # allows a space
$ # anchor at the end",
RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace);
That way, even my little brain can understand a freakin’ regular expression.
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