The first time I ever encountered a regular expression was many years ago now, but I still remember my first thoughts on it: What is this string-like thing? I don’t want to touch it, it looks scary. I ...

Regular expressions are a powerful tool for manipulating textual information, allowing you to perform the sophisticated processing you describe. Before I explain the solution, let's back up one step ...

If you’ve programmed in Perl or any other language with built-in regular-expression capabilities, then you probably know how much easier regular expressions make text processing and pattern matching.

If you consider yourself a good cook, you may or may not know how to make a souffle or baklava. But there are certain things you probably do know how to do that form the basis of many recipes. For ...

Regular expressions come in handy for all varieties of text processing, but are often misunderstood--even by veteran developers. Here's a look at intermediate-level regular expressions and what they ...

Quick: If you shout "regular expressions" in a crowd of Linux users, what happens? Answer: Everyone will tell you the right way to use them, and every answer will be different. Regular expressions -- ...

You know the maxim, “Give a man to fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”? A similar adage applies to anyone who spends a lot of time working with text on their ...

Imagine you are looking for a name in a telephone directory, but you can't remember its exact spelling. You can spend ages searching through all the possible combinations, unless you have a tool that ...