Regular Expressions

[deviantbunnylord at gmail.com]

> That's a little harsh -- regexes have their place, together with pointer
> arithmetic, bit manipulations, reverse polish notation and goto. The
> problem is when people use them inappropriately e.g. using a regex when a
> simple string.find will do.
>
> > A quote attributed variously to
> > Tim Peters and Jamie Zawinski says "Some people, when confronted with a
> > problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two
> > problems."
>
> I believe that is correctly attributed to Jamie Zawinski.
>
> --
> Steven

So as a newbie, I have to ask. I've played with the re module now for
a while, I think regular expressions are super fun and useful. As far
as them being a problem I found they can be tricky and sometimes the
regex's I've devised do unexpected things...(which I can think of two
instances where that unexpected thing was something that I had hoped
to get into further down the line, yay for me!). So I guess I don't
really understand why they are a "bad idea" to use. I don't know of
any other way yet to parse specific data out of a text, html, or xml
file without resorting to regular expressions.
What other ways are there?