# A Practical Core Subset of Regular Expressions

DevFeed: [A Practical Core Subset of Regular Expressions](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/regex-isn-t-hard-33418.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://timkellogg.me/blog/2023/07/11/regex>)

Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Tim Kellogg](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/tim-kellogg.md>)

Topics: [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [complexity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/complexity.md>), [languages](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/languages.md>), [portable](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/portable.md>), [programming-languages](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming-languages.md>), [regex](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/regex.md>)

## AI overview

This tutorial presents a core subset of regular expressions that is intended to be easier to understand and remember. It explains why regex can be useful, notes that shortcuts add complexity, and introduces character sets, repetition, groups, and operators.

## Source excerpt

Regex gets a bad reputation for being very complex. That's fair, but I also think that if you focus on a certain core subset of regex, it's not that hard. Most of the complexity comes from various "shortcuts" that are hard to remember. If you ignore those, the language itself is fairly small and portable across programming languages.