When I first starting learning regexes, one of the books I was reading suggested doing that as future proofing - just because a punctuation character has no meaning in a regular expression now does not mean it won't in the future, and that would be a bug I'd hate to try and track down. I do agree that the result is my expressions suffer from leaning_toothpick_syndrome. I've cut back a bit, but something about that darned comma just begs to be escaped.