Revision 4c9f1918-515d-4428-9fc9-5ea26648e0a7 - Meta Stack Exchange

**Meme:** Two problems.

**Originator:** Unknown (the quote itself is by Jamie Zawinski)

**Cultural Height:** Neverending

**Background:** A quotation by Jamie Zawinski goes like this:

> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

There are many questions on SO relating to regular expressions, and many answers that suggest regular expressions. In a lot of cases, a regular expression is simply not necessary or even useful. Hence the phrase, "Now you have two problems," usually posted as a comment.

**Examples:** [Here][1], [here][2], [here][3], [here][4].

A regular expression question also [caused the breakdown][5] of an SO member.


 [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/938065/how-to-match-a-string-of-a-certain-length-with-a-regex
 [2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/82064/a-regex-for-version-number-parsing/82152#82152
 [3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1332590/html-comment-scraping-in-php/1332640#1332640
 [4]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1061365/help-with-building-regex-to-extract-text-of-html-tag
 [5]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454