The 5th Annual Regular Expression Day (And Prizes) - June 1st, 2012

Wow, I was lousy at that! It would be nice if it showed which ones I got right at the end after it's insulted me with "you've got 1 right". ;-)

Normally we work the other way around trying to create a regex to achieve a goal, so it was fun and proves what a great logical language regexes are for COMPUTERS to understand! :-D Good stuff Ben, you never fail to entertain through good tutorials, humour or challenges.

Love the game, Ben. I've played through it a few times, scoring between 14 and 23. So hey, other players, at least you know a number to beat. :)

With some additional features, I think this could actually be a great learning tool. If you ever end up spending more time on it, one thing that might be interesting to look into is some kind of pattern generation/randomization (within constraints), rather than choosing randomly from a list of prewritten patterns.

I love the idea, it was entertaining :)

Okay, I'm done... I feel my score is very respectable... 33 :-)

Can't get past that number...

I need some work with the \b selector... the \b..\b. something or other one always made me pause way too long.

THANKS soo much for putting this together! Regex is the tool that everyone should master

33? That's just not natural! Solving just over 1 per second. You needn't bother owning a computer with that kind of brain power inside your noggin. ;-)

Better fire it up again, @Ben Dalton. I just scored 34. ;-) And I'm a slow typist.

Damn, and I was kinda proud of my little ol' 5...

Make that 36. :)

Jason Salvo, I played through it more than a dozen times, so the numbers I (and probably Ben Dalton) posted aren't entirely fair.

Ben Nadel, some of the regexes are very well designed for this challenge. As Ben Dalton mentioned, the \b..\b style regexes, as well as some of those with backreferences, take a moment to think through, which is good. I also like the ones that have a shorter answer (which saves on typing time) than is immediately obvious.

oh man! I was hoping you'd do the pix thing again this year so I'd at least have half a chance! Oh well...I still tried lol. I probably did the worst. I hope you'll leave it up, though, so we can practice with it. I know my score probably won't improve any, but I bet it will help me at least learn a little about reg ex's a little more.

Thanks for having this! It was fun.

Great game. I keep playing even though the contest is over. You should create a leader board and stats (#attempts, % correct, etc) for next year's contest.

Best regex day yet. I hope you'll consider expanding on the game as Quincy suggested. Maybe add a time penalty/reward for getting answers wrong/right. (I found that I can cheat by just skipping the \b..\b one.)

I love the way that a lot of the regexes have an easily guessable answer (like /M(o)(\1|u)se/), but it takes a bit of thinking to figure out why the answer is correct and what not-so-obvious alternatives exist. How can you exploit that? Maybe present the same regex again later and ask for a different answer to the one that was given previously?

I think you should make next "year's" (not sure I really want to wait that long) contest about submitting material for your "input" file. This is one of those fun ways to learn, and more examples would really improve it.

Wow, awesome! I knew I did well, but I have to admit that I never actually expected to hold the high score.

Thanks for the game Ben! It was insanely fun and I certainly learned a few new tricks while playing.

My regFu is much stronger now... :>

That was fun. I did play the game a few more times. the score improved, but I guess it wouldn't ever improve enough to win or anything. At least I'm learning regex a little better (I think).