There was a time when I didn’t know regular expressions.  Lately I have been having to parse a lot of textual based files, and I have found even a small use of regular expressions speeds up my development.  However, I think the problem is if you try to do everything with them, then you’re using them wrong.  I think this is mainly due to the fact that it’s hard to comment a regular expression.  So if you can’t quickly look at the regular expression and figure out what it means, it’s no better than code you can’t read.

One site, that I have used a lot when programming regular expressions is https://regex101.com/.  It makes writing and understanding regular expressions much easier.