Hello World!

At the SouthEast LinuxFest, on June 11, 2011, I'll be giving a talk on advanced regular expressions.  As a regex becomes more complex, it quickly becomes hard to read.  This idea inspired the blog name, Write-Only Code.  While that term typically carries a derogatory connotation, I'm embracing it here.  I hope to show how expressions may be built in a step-wise fashion with abstraction.  Even if the end result looks like line noise, the expression may be understood by the process of its construction.  Here's an example from a perl script:

s/^((?:"(?:\\.|[^"])+"|'[^']+'|[^#])*).*$/$1/; 

In the next post, I'll build this up in steps with explanations along the way.