This is a funny quote. I really hope it doesn't keep people from learning regular expressions, which are actually not as hard as they are often portrayed and extremely powerful and efficient, as demonstrated in this post.
Sure it's powerful and a lot of them are easy. But there's a lot of indecipherable regexes in the wild. I guess you need to learn them anyway, but I'm very strict about using them in production
This is probably an ideal case though. Regular expressions are a part of the JavaScript standard, so there's no excuse for someone that programs in JavaScript to not know at least the basics, and this is almost as basic as you can get.
The alternative is what, a simple tokenizing parser? I think that's actually a step squarely into territory of making it more complex and less readable than a simple regular expression is.
Jamie Zawinski