How important is knowing Regexs?

Question

My personal experience is that regexs solve problems that can\'t be efficiently solved any other way, and are so frequently required in a world where strings are as important as

Answer 1

What does the following do?

"([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9+.-]{1,120}:A-Za-z0-9/{1,333}(#([a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*,;/?:@&~=%-]{0,1000}))?)"

How long did it take you to figure out? to debug?

Regexs are awesome for single-use throwaway programs, but long hairy regexps are not the best choice for programs that other people will need to maintain over the years.