My interpretation
When it comes to problem description, I try to avoid as much reading between the lines as possible. Specially when it comes to regular expressions. Sure, I could have given him a regex according to some interpretation. Would that have solved his immediate problem? Perhaps, if my interpretation happened to be right. Would he have learned anything, that is, would he have been able to solve his next regex problem? Probably not.

No, instead I try him to think again. To look at the problem - poke at it, disect it, and formulate what he really wants. Formulate a regexp problem properly, and you have solved it for 90% - all you need to do is the translation to an arcane language - but that's fairly mechanical at that point.

In Dutch we have a saying "Zachte heelmeesters maken stinkende wonden", which translated means something like "Gentle healers make festering wounds".

Abigail

In reply to Re: regular expressions question by Abigail-II
in thread regular expressions question by apocalyptica

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