Best, IMHO, because it is now quite obvious what “the programmer’s intent” must have been.   Anytime I see a regex, I know I’m going to have to “figure out” the regex in order to be certain what the code was meant to do, and I’m going to worry that the bug might actually be caused by some edge-case that the clever programmer didn’t anticipate.   If the same thing can be done with something that is simpler, it’s better.