I have to use a ton of regex in my new job (plz save me), and I use ChatGPT for all of it. My job would be 10x harder if it wasn’t for ChatGPT. It provides extremely detailed examples and warns you of situations where the regex may not perform as expected. Seriously, try it out.

@BenLloydPearson@programming.dev
creator
link
fedilink
English
141Y

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

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 didn’t work. The final solution, while not exactly perfect - it won’t keep a quote at the end of a sentence, and honorifics like Mr. and Dr. throw it - it wasn’t 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.

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.

Create a post

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



  • 1 user online
  • 1 user / day
  • 1 user / week
  • 1 user / month
  • 1.11K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.21K Posts
  • 17.8K Comments
  • Modlog