Yesterday I was trying to create a Regex for a condition. It took me nearly three hours to figure that out. Regex concepts are hard to wrap one's head around.
actually regex is really easy, at least as soon as you understand state-machines. you could look for a parser but in the end regex is a tool designed to parse regular expressions.
the problem is grouping and sub-grouping and how to write them properly. you can try regex golf for training http://regex.alf.nu/ or https://regex101.com/ for testing your regex with grouping explanations.
but if you just need simple matching you can always use string comparison which theoretically result in O(n) which is okay or you could go for specific lexer/scanner/parser implementations.
it's likely they use regex themselves but you could use the abstract interfaces for access :) at the beginning it's hard to wrap ones head around such things as always that's because you have to learn the fundamental basics first, than it's easys
Jeremy Bloomstrom
Programmer Analyst
Check out VerbalExpressions. It's a fluent library for building up regular expressions. It's available for most popular languages. Here is the repo for JavaScript: github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions