Jake here, in classic programmer fashion, late on the first update. Anyhoo, we're revisiting some classic WTFs this week while Alex is on vacation or undergoing surgery or whatever he said he was doing. So here's one of my personal favorite WTFs from Scott Elkin for you to read while wishing Alex a happy vacation or speedy recovery.
I'll admit it. When I first came across regular expressions, they seemed a bit intimidating. But, after spending about three or four minutes reading about them I felt a lot more comfortable. Apparently, Scott Elkin's colleague didn't feel like investing those three or four minutes learning regular expressions. Or looping through the individual characters on the string. Well ... at least this way it's all on one line.
Scott also mentions this is only part of the replacement -- his colleague uses this technique to replace every symbol. Heh.