> If I’m not mistaken, even JSON couldn’t be parsed by a regex due to the recursive nature of nested objects.
You can parse ANY context-free language with regex so long as you're willing to put a cap on the maximum nesting depth and length of constructs in that language. You can't parse "JSON" but you can, absolutely, parse "JSON with up to 1000 nested brackets" or "JSON shorter than 10GB". The lexical complexity is irrelevant. Mathematically, whether you have JSON, XML, sexps, or whatever is irrelevant: you can describe any bounded-nesting context-free language as a regular language and parse it with a state machine.
It is dangerous to tell the wrong people this, but it is true.
(Similarly, you can use a context-free parser to understand a context-sensitive language provided you bound that language in some way: one example is the famous C "lexer hack" that allows a simple LALR(1) parser to understand C, which, properly understood, is a context-sensitive language in the Chomsky sense.)
The best experience for the average programmer is describing their JSON declaratively in something like Zod and having their language runtime either build the appropriate state machine (or "regex") to match that schema or, if it truly is recursive, using something else to parse --- all transparently to the programmer.
You can parse ANY context-free language with regex so long as you're willing to put a cap on the maximum nesting depth and length of constructs in that language. You can't parse "JSON" but you can, absolutely, parse "JSON with up to 1000 nested brackets" or "JSON shorter than 10GB". The lexical complexity is irrelevant. Mathematically, whether you have JSON, XML, sexps, or whatever is irrelevant: you can describe any bounded-nesting context-free language as a regular language and parse it with a state machine.
It is dangerous to tell the wrong people this, but it is true.
(Similarly, you can use a context-free parser to understand a context-sensitive language provided you bound that language in some way: one example is the famous C "lexer hack" that allows a simple LALR(1) parser to understand C, which, properly understood, is a context-sensitive language in the Chomsky sense.)
The best experience for the average programmer is describing their JSON declaratively in something like Zod and having their language runtime either build the appropriate state machine (or "regex") to match that schema or, if it truly is recursive, using something else to parse --- all transparently to the programmer.