Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants

1 The map and the territory

This book winds through a combination of two quite different things, both of which I believe will be largely novel to most of my readers. On the one hand, this is a puzzle book intended to be more “quirky” and “fun” than to serve as a tutorial or reference text per se. However, the puzzles I have chosen should make both beginners and experienced users of regular expressions question what is and is not possible within them—and perhaps what should and should not be done using them—and burrow into readers’ brains, as if some parasitic eidetic worm. This book is not without an overriding pedagogical subtext: I expect you to think differently, and indeed more productively, if you can solve these puzzles (or at least reflect ...