Python has another somewhat reasonable solution. Either of those solutions can be combined with good programming to constitute a reasonable solution.

> Personally I prefer though the terseness of regular expressions.

I think there are legitimate use-cases for both.

If you're quickly hacking out a small good-enough parser for something regular or "almost regular", terseness can be great.

However, if you're parsing a large regular language, terseness isn't really a benefit. Perl is on its bed for a reason, and overly terse regular expressions should die for a similar reason. Overly-clever write-only coding culture sucks.

But the terseness of regular expressions is basically terrible beyond maybe a few hundred characters. E.g., the following has no place in production code -- you might as well just include a binary:

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