You should know how to do anything you do with regex. You use regex because doing that by hand would be terribly annoying.

I consider regex to be a basic, most useful tool at your disposal. I recommend everyone to get fluent with them. Fluent as in, last night I was talking to pops about some product and I didn't remember the name, so I didn't hesitate to tell him what I knew with a regular expression which included a backreference.