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Chris Adams
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 29,424 PointsAcknowledging online sources
Hey all,
In Joel’s course on regular expressions, he discusses how there are likely already solutions to a number of regular expression needs available online.
He provides this snippet as an example:
/^(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).*$/
My question is about best practice in web development. To what extent should we be referencing or acknowledging the source when we take solutions we find online?
1 Answer
Christopher Wester
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 4,058 PointsI am not a developer But when I go to the popular coding website StackOverflow The code posted in each question chat has a copy button that includes code attribution
// Source - https://stackoverflow.com/a/79933825
// Posted by Tuhin Shaikh
// Retrieved 2026-04-30, License - CC BY-SA 4.0
document.addEventListener('change', e => {
if (e.target.matches('input[name="file"]')) alert('Input changed');
});
As you can see, you can place just about anything in comments Not every code snippet on the web will have a license included It is up to you to determine what you feel the need to include when you borrow code from the web.
Personally, I like the 3 lines of comments which include: Who?, Where?, When?
Bradley Anderson
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 19,647 PointsBradley Anderson
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 19,647 PointsInterested in answer to this also!