  Regular expressions (regexes) are a powerful mechanism for solving
string-matching problems. They are supported by all modern programming
languages, and have been estimated to appear in more than a third of Python and
JavaScript projects. Yet existing studies have focused mostly on one aspect of
regex programming: readability. We know little about how developers perceive
and program regexes, nor the difficulties that they face.
  In this paper, we provide the first study of the regex development cycle,
with a focus on (1) how developers make decisions throughout the process, (2)
what difficulties they face, and (3) how aware they are about serious risks
involved in programming regexes. We took a mixed-methods approach, surveying
279 professional developers from a diversity of backgrounds (including top tech
firms) for a high-level perspective, and interviewing 17 developers to learn
the details about the difficulties that they face and the solutions that they
prefer.
  In brief, regexes are hard. Not only are they hard to read, our participants
said that they are hard to search for, hard to validate, and hard to document.
They are also hard to master: the majority of our studied developers were
unaware of critical security risks that can occur when using regexes, and those
who knew of the risks did not deal with them in effective manners. Our findings
provide multiple implications for future work, including semantic regex search
engines for regex reuse and improved input generators for regex validation.

Software Engineering