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Ben Nadel at CFUNITED 2010 (Landsdown, VA) with: Siobhan Bartz
Ben Nadel at CFUNITED 2010 (Landsdown, VA) with: Siobhan Bartz

The 11th Annual Regular Expression Day - June 1st 2018

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I can't believe how the time flies! It's just crazy! It's already June 1st - and that means that it's time to show some love to the unsung heros of the programming world: Regular Expressions (aka RegEx). And, to shower praise on the unbelievable power of String-based pattern matching. And of course, what celebration would be complete with out some sweet, sweet prizes (ie, Amazon.com gift certificates)!

NOTE: If you are already completely lost and have no idea what I'm talking about, please checkout my video and slide presentation - Regular Expressions, Extraordinary Power. They will blow your mind and change your world forever.

Every year, I try to be at least a little creative in honor of Regular Expressions. Usually that means trying to program something that uses Regular Expressions in order to accomplish a task. But, this year, I wanted to go in a different direction - flex a slightly different creative muscle. This year, I wanted to reach back to my "Creative Writing: Poetry" roots and write an ode to the majestic beauty of the RegEx construct.


 
 
 

 
Happy Regular Expression Day 2018  
 
 
 

Now, it's your turn! I'm giving away one $100 Amazon.com gift card and four $50 Amazon.com gift cards. In order to enter to win, you have to write a haiku about Regular Expressions and leave it in the comments below. A haiku doesn't have to rhyme - it just has to be three lines that each have a set number of syllables:

  • Line one has 5 syllables.
  • Line 2 has 7 syllables.
  • Line three has 5 syllables.

The haiku can be in praise of, or in condemnation of Regular Expressions - your choice. Let's see what you can do!

Winners will be selected at random Sunday afternoon (June 3rd, 2018).

Happy Regular Expression day! May this day be sweet and free of catastrophic back-tracking!

Reader Comments

15,848 Comments

From Mike Nichols (for some reason he couldn't post):

"You may look behind".
Cryptic past - I look around.
Nobly look ahead.

15,848 Comments

Loving the entries so far!! Had some fun this morning as well:

Pluses on pluses:
Catastrophic backtracking!
Don't crash my server.

15,848 Comments

@Alice L,

Oh noes! I just realized that the markdown parser I started using today is not turning line-breaks into hard-returns. I can fix that -- it's a setting. Will fix your comment (and the others) in the database.

15,848 Comments

@All,

Sorry about that -- hard breaks are now upheld. I've fixed the last few haikus since the markdown parser was implemented. woot

15,848 Comments

Good morning all you beautiful people. Through the power of the Crypto module's pseudo-random number generator in Node.js, I have selected the winners of the RegEx Day 2018 Haiku contest:

  • Mark Gregory -- $100
  • Erika Rich -- $50
  • Dave Lewis -- $50
  • Joshua Miller -- $50
  • Charles Robertson -- $50

Congratulations -- and a huge thank you to everyone who participated. I was overjoyed to see the poems that you all produced! For the selected poems, please send me an email at ben@bennadel.com so that we can arrange the Amazon.com gift cards.

Happy Monday and have a wonderful week!

15,848 Comments

@All,

If anyone is interested in how the winners were selected, I published the simple algorithm I used. It's built on top of a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG) in Node.js:

www.bennadel.com/blog/3455-randomly-selecting-regex-day-winners-using-a-cryptographically-secure-pseudo-random-number-generator-csprng-in-node-js.htm

It was an interesting little exercise on its own, because I read up (briefly) about easy it is to create a biased transformation of random bytes, especially in cases where the target values are small (less than 256) as were mine in this scenario. As such, I had to use an npm module that transformed the random bytes in such a way as to avoid bias.

15,848 Comments

Ok, I never heard from Mark Gregory -- so, by reason that Alice Mora wrote a Haiku in response to the winner selection, his prize falls through to her.

@Alice,

Please write to me at ben@bennadel.com. Cheers!

I believe in love. I believe in compassion. I believe in human rights. I believe that we can afford to give more of these gifts to the world around us because it costs us nothing to be decent and kind and understanding. And, I want you to know that when you land on this site, you are accepted for who you are, no matter how you identify, what truths you live, or whatever kind of goofy shit makes you feel alive! Rock on with your bad self!
Ben Nadel