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Regular expressions (regexes) are a powerful mechanism for solvingstring-matching problems. They are supported by all modern programminglanguages, and have been estimated to appear in more than a third of Python andJavaScript projects. Yet existing studies have focused mostly on one aspect ofregex programming: readability. We know little about how developers perceiveand 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 risksinvolved in programming regexes. We took a mixed-methods approach, surveying279 professional developers from a diversity of backgrounds (including top techfirms) for a high-level perspective, and interviewing 17 developers to learnthe details about the difficulties that they face and the solutions that theyprefer.  In brief, regexes are hard. Not only are they hard to read, our participantssaid 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 wereunaware of critical security risks that can occur when using regexes, and thosewho knew of the risks did not deal with them in effective manners. Our findingsprovide multiple implications for future work, including semantic regex searchengines for regex reuse and improved input generators for regex validation.

Regexes are Hard: Decision-making, Difficulties, and Risks in Programming Regular Expressions