Regular expressions in lexing and parsing

Comments extracted from a code review. I've been asked to disseminate them more widely.

I should say something about regular expressions in lexing and

parsing. Regular expressions are hard to write, hard to write well,

and can be expensive relative to other technologies. (Even when they

are implemented correctly in N*M time, they have significant

overheads, especially if they must capture the output.)



Lexers, on the other hand, are fairly easy to write correctly (if not

as compactly), and very easy to test. Consider finding alphanumeric

identifiers. It's not too hard to write the regexp (something like

"[a-ZA-Z_][a-ZA-Z_0-9]*"), but really not much harder to write as a

simple loop. The performance of the loop, though, will be much higher

and will involve much less code under the covers. A regular expression

library is a big thing. Using one to parse identifiers is like using a

Ferrari to go to the store for milk.



And when we want to adjust our lexer to admit other character types,

such as Unicode identifiers, and handle normalization, and so on, the

hand-written loop can cope easily but the regexp approach will break

down.



A similar argument applies to parsing. Using regular expressions to

explore the parse state to find the way forward is expensive,

overkill, and error-prone. Standard lexing and parsing techniques are

so easy to write, so general, and so adaptable there's no reason to

use regular expressions. They also result in much faster, safer, and

compact implementations.

Another way to look at it is that lexers and parsing are matching

statically-defined patterns, but regular expressions' strength is that

they provide a way to express patterns dynamically. They're great in

text editors and search tools, but when you know at compile time what

all the things are you're looking for, regular expressions bring far

more generality and flexibility than you need.



Finally, on the point about writing well. Regular expressions are, in

my experience, widely misunderstood and abused. When I do code reviews

involving regular expressions, I fix up a far higher fraction of the

regular expressions in the code than I do regular statements. This is

a sign of misuse: most programmers (no finger pointing here, just

observing a generality) simply don't know what they are or how to use

them correctly.



Encouraging regular expressions as a panacea for all text processing

problems is not only lazy and poor engineering, it also reinforces

their use by people who shouldn't be using them at all.



So don't write lexers and parsers with regular expressions as the

starting point. Your code will be faster, cleaner, and much easier to

understand and to maintain.