Surely complexity is a factor? A procedual implementation will necessarily have the same essential complexity as the regex it replaces, but then it will additionally have a bunch of incidental complexity in matching and looping and backtracking.
Regexes can certainly be hard to read - the solution is to use formatting and comments to make them easier to understand - not to drown the logic in reams of boilerplate code.
Regexes can certainly be hard to read - the solution is to use formatting and comments to make them easier to understand - not to drown the logic in reams of boilerplate code.