This is the first part of a series of articles about regular expressions in Vim. Here’s the complete table of content:

“We should never write regular expressions. They are difficult to learn, understand, and maintain. They can spiral in a wormhole of quantum complexity. We should burn them to the ground!”

That was Dave, your colleague developer, patronizing you for using a simple regex to parse an HTML file. Even if you don’t like the tone of your colleague, you ask yourself: are regular expressions that bad? Should we use them?