This AI stuff is SCARY!!!

[madscijr]

There's one area I'm finding AI is actually helpful for - regular expressions!!! 
Regex is something which can save hours of manual editing but is so fugly, I pretty much rely on google to find useful bits. 
Imagine my surprise when google (not gemini, just regular google) started answering my regex questions like a champ! 

For example,

• What regex to find all ": {value}" where {value} is not inside single or double quotes? 
  

Is Google up to the challenge? It answers! 

Code: (Select All)

: (?![ "'])((?:^"'\r\n:]|:(?! |$))+)(?![ "'])

And I'll be damned, it works! No way I'd have the patience to figure that one out.

Then it answered my follow-up question,

• What regex to use in Notepad++ to find (above regex) and replace to add single quotes after the : and at the end of the line? 
  

and google answers

Code: (Select All)

Find:
: (?![ "'])((?:^"'\r\n:]|:(?! |$))+)(?![ "'])$

Replace with:
: '\1'

and that worked too, a single operation that accomplished in 1 second what would have taken me HOURS of manual editing of this 14,000+ lines 600k file. And that was just one example, it helped with 20 other such conundrums.

Oh and did I mention that it also breaks down the regex and explains what each piece does? 

So if I want to stop being a whiny little girl and maybe learn to do this myself, there's that. 

I don't know what AI means for job security or humanity's continued survival, but for stuff like this - tedious shit that you don't want to do - it's pure gold! 

PS the problem comes when it gets used to do stuff that you DO want to do!