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);

 

That way, even my little brain can understand a freakin’ regular expression.