Your feedback about regular expressions

[Hungry Bulldozer]

We've got a feedback on BlackHatWorld about regular expressions usage in ZennoPoster.
Here is this:

Bull! I just bought ZP and have been playing with it and cant do anything decent without learning Regex!
If in Ubot you just scrape by elements? You got to do all sort of messy stuff, regex composing through another program RegexMagic, as the built in regex isnt powerful enough.
I bought it coz of the reviews with words like ZP is many times better than ubot.Or like they regret having purchase Ubot first,coz ZP can do everything?
BULLSHIT!
It probably has more potential power under the hood? But its certainly a lot harder to use. It will never be as easy as Ubot because of its reliance on Regex.
I dont regret my purchase, but stop that BS that it can be a replacement to Ubot.
For the average user, even if u had both, you'd end up using ubot for your projects.
I just dont understand WHY and how you can tell us ZP is much easier and more user friendly? I fuckin hate Regex and ZP IS regex dependent!
Hopefully that regex dependency is reduced in the new ZP 4 if thats even going to come out.
Ubot can do the same regex functions, but its not dependent on it, such as in scraping.
And for ubot developers? I hope you incorporate ZP's mindmap,loop thingy. I find it superior with Ubots If then, Loop logics.
Looking at it on one angle, ZP does have fewer things to learn, so the illusion that it is simpler. But only if you dont do Regex dependent tasks.
Youre fucked if you know basic Regex and need to extract complex objects. Like me I always start out trying to create in ZP, only to abandon it and start over again in Ubot.
ZP cant do everything unless youre a coder.
And the debug mode. Why cant we just run it continous in the project maker? So save it, then run it on Zenno all the time? Annoying. Just let it run on the project maker, not step by step, but continous as an aoption! If it works, then we export and run it in Zennoposter.
If I had to choose 1? I'd choose ubot.

In our opinion we need them only in mail processing and in parsing tasks and most of the tasks are covered by Regexp Builder.
Your feedbacks are important for us and that's why we wanted to see your feedbacks about regular expressions in ZennoPoster here.
Would be great to get reviews in comparison with Ubot regexp.

 

[madsem]

I'm using regex in all my templates, to parse out field names, parse out what captcha a site is using etc etc
I could not imagine using Zenno if did not have all the advanced capabilities that zenno offers compared to Ubot.

I don't wan't something easier, I wan't a tool that gives me the power to do anything I want, and V3 is already close to that.


If you now start listening to noobs that are not even WILLING to learn a little bit to propel their internet marketing career, you will ruin Zenno.
This is the best tool on the market, and if you start making "things easier" that automatically means we don't have as much freedom anymore as we used to have.

In my opinion you should even improve the regex functionality, meaning adjusting the regex builder, give it more functionality etc etc but not start making everything drag & drop, click & go, noob wonderland ready.
I would certainly stop using zenno if that is the case and I can not do all the advanced things I can do now.

To be honest, I'm also really against what nuaro said on BHW, that v4 will probably have bot compiling features... (if you can give the bot to everyone its bad, if you can share it with other zenno users, as a compiled bot it would be awesome)


Please, don't listen to BS like that, if people are not willing to learn they don't deserve Zenno and i sincerely hope you will start to improve regex, add more regex functionality etc etc, make the designer more user friendly and give it more functions (emulating clicks, drag & drop solving in designer mode etc etc) but don't start reinventing the wheel trying to make it as easy as possible for everybody, in the end the tool that comes out of that will suck. You can not make a tool that everybody likes.


PS: about the step by step debug in project maker, the guy has a point... it really is super annoying that we can not let it run to a certain step and stop, run conious mode, edit template while debug is running... debug mode should be heavily improved

 

[madsem]

PS: If I might throw in my list of suggestions thread at this point: http://zennolab.com/discussion/showthread.php?4080-The-Big-Zenno-Wishlist-Please-add-your-thoughts-and-wishes-too&p=25271
implement that and Zenno will already be much easier and more powerful