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How come you search code with regex? Isn’t it a bit difficult

Capability wise it's orders of magnitude more powerful than plain text search. Difficulty wise yes there's a learning curve but once you climb that it becomes second nature. (While learning I even tried out some Regex-based games to build that muscle memory) . Most people never get to it because they never encounter a need. I had to because in one of the earliest roles in my career I was working on Apache Spark and every little logical change called for validation the CSV file outputted by Spark with that of another (known stable) system. Since output files generated by both were formatted differently, I learnt using regexes to unify their format for a comparison using Linux's diff command. . That's when I got to know about concepts like 'group capture' (and substitution for replacement) in regexes and it completely blew my mind. I've performed code refactorings of 300-400 lines spanning across tens of across codebase simply by doing a Regex find and replace . Nowadays I don't learn anything new: I think I pretty much know everything that's relevant for me in day to day work. Last cool thing I had learnt with them 2-3 years back was concept of lookahead and lookbehind.