title: When is it best to use Regular Expressions over basic string splitting / substring'ing?
body: <p>It seems that the choice to use string parsing vs. regular expressions comes up on a regular basis for me anytime a situation arises that I need part of a string, information about said string, etc.</p>
  
  <p>The reason that this comes up is that we're evaluating a soap header's action, <strong>after</strong> it has been parsed into something manageable via the OperationContext object for WCF and <em>then</em> making decisions on that.  Right now, the simple solution seems to be basic substring'ing to keep the implementation simple, but part of me wonders if RegEx would be better or more robust.  The other part of me wonders if it'd be like using a shotgun to kill a fly in our particular scenario.</p>
  
  <p>So I have to ask, what's the typical threshold that people use when trying to decide to use RegEx over typical string parsing.  Note that I'm not very strong in Regular Expressions, and because of this, I try to shy away unless it's absolutely vital to avoid introducing more complication than I need.</p>
  
  <p>If you couldn't tell by my choice of abbreviations, this is in .NET land (C#), but I believe that doesn't have much bearing on the question.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: It seems as per my typical Raybell charm, I've been too wordy or misleading in my question.  I want to apologize.  I was giving some background to help give clues as to what I was doing, not mislead people.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm basically looking for a guideline as to when to use substring, and variations thereof, over Regular Expressions and vice versa.  And while some of the answers may have missed this (and again, my fault), I've genuinely appreciated them and up-voted as accordingly.</p>