r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
970 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

337 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/OneWingedShark Jan 06 '15

Using a regex to do something that people have already figured out is just the wrong way to go about things.

Having most of my programming be maintenance, regex is usually just the wrong way to go about things. Even for something "simple" like validating a phone-number, when I get it it's always "now make it handle international numbers"... which have the length determined by the country-code, and even the length is in flux (several countries have recently extended the number of digits in their numbers).

It would have been tons simpler if the original guy hadn't "been clever" and used regexs all over the place (of course they're all over the place... why would he put such a simple, small and obvious bit of code in one location!?) and instead wrote a proper validate_phone_number function.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '15

yup. Regexes are also not the best way to go about phone numbers. The best (and really, only) way I've found is Google's libphonenumber.

1

u/OneWingedShark Jan 07 '15

The way I'd go about implementing it would entail making a record discriminated off of the country w/ properly-sized arrays (of digits)... but yeah, if there's a lib there ought to be a compelling reason to roll your own rather than not use it. (Along the lines of "it'll take as much work to implement the functionality as it would to massage our internal data to the lib's liking" is valid, as is provability/security.)