Regex is a great tool, fast and very powerful. I see loads of people moaning about regex being not easy to read, but I see no-one offering to produce a readable alternative. Until someone writes a more readable alternative then regex is still the best there is. If you are presented with a massive string of unreadable regex then it was a human that produced that. A programmer failed to break it up into substrings each named to represent their function. It was a human that failed to comment what is going on. You can write a dense block of unreadable code in any language. You don't need regex to produce that. The core fault here isn't with regex, it is with lazy programmers.