this is post #2 of my 30 day challenge. If you've ever written any non-trivial String processing code, you've probably ran into the situation where you wanted to exclude certain parts of your string for a certain operation. Usually that would mean you have to tokenize your string, or adjust the operation you want to run so it doesn't affect the part of the string you want to exclude from it. Both of those solutions can be fairly time intensive so I was looking for a shortcut and found one.

Let me make a practical example so this sounds less like hypothetical BS: Let's say you have written your own Textile-inspired parser, but you want to allow sections to remain untouched by the parser as well. My solution: Just substitute the parts you want to exclude from textile processing with UUIDs and put them back in afterwards: