On 26 May 2016 at 22:39, Sven R. Kunze <srkunze@mail.de> wrote:
However, the absence of it forces people to invent other more flexible mechanisms and I'd actually like it this way.
For a bigger project maybe. If I were writing a proper parser for my file, I wouldn't have done it like I did. But this was a relatively quick, essentially one-off, data extraction task (that's what I do 99% of the time) and for that, simple solutions are much more appropriate. If I had a matching statement in my toolkit, I would have used it. If I had a matching *library* I would have used it. (But not regex, it's too messy for this particular task). But I wouldn't build my own "more flexible" mechanism - my job today was to get the data out, not to write reusable (or even long-term maintainable, if I'm honest!) code. This does make one good point though - if this sort of matching could be provided with a library, that would be just as viable an option for my use case. But I've not seen such a library yet. Paul