If you can do the same manipulation in three ones of code it’s more likely to be correct and stay correct. And when you look at it again in six months you won’t have to stare at it. All those little time sucks add up as the code grows.
Edit: autocorrect got me twice.
Firsly, for relatively simple regex expressions, any competent developer should be able to grok them very quickly - at least as quick as the equivelant C#/Java/whatever code.
Secondly, it may be that regex is the most performant solution, and sometimes that matters quite a bit.
Honestly, I just don't get why some people are intimidated by regex.
1/ the regex engine
2/ host language
3/ problem you're trying to solve
But I've found generally I was better off not using regex for performance critical code.
HOWEVER (!!!) where regex consistently wins is development time. Not just writing the code, but testing (it's trivially easy to test regex) and updating the pattern matching (Vs updating the equipment character matching in an imperative language).
Yeah regex can get ugly quickly, but then so can any language if misused.