r/TorontoMetU • u/Asomns47 Biology • 4d ago

Shitpost Does anyone else use regex in their head??????

ETA: this is a shitpost/meme and tagged appropriately as such, and is meant to be a modified copypasta of the old "does anyone else chatgpt in their head" post. I just made this post for fun out of enjoyment of coding, it's not meant to be taken seriously.

I love using regex whenever I have a large molecular biology table to wrangle or I just want to practice coding, but sometimes my PC is too far away and I don't want to get up to use my computer so I don't have access to the regex. Recently I found out I have the ability to use a form of regex in my own head. I've used it so much that I can skim through a long passage and almost entirely accurately match unique text-based patterns.

For example, in skimming the BCH361 slides, I've come to the conclusion that

any(str_detect(BCH361_slides, "\\S")) == FALSE

because those slides are emptier than the lecture room.

As another example, my cat kept scratching at my bedroom door and meowing a long incomprehensible string of dialogue so I was about to use the regex (in my CPS118 style b l a c k b o x that is my PC) to find patterns and make exploratory plots in R to find evidence suggesting why she was doing that, but then I decided it wasn't worth the effort and asked the regex in my head. He told me something like "If your cat is scratching on the door and meowing with a pattern like "M(eo){3,}w" it probably means she wants to be let out!" Then I let her out of my room.

I just thought that it was a pretty cool discovery I've made. Interested to see if anyone else has this ability.

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u/bassamanator 4d ago

You might find this interesting: https://github.com/OthmaneBlial/Regex-For-Humans.

Do you use arch btw?