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 ...

These are the formal rules for forming basic UNIX regular expressions. For some simple examples, skip to Simple Examples. The rules come from the Solaris 7 regexp(5) manual page. The I2A2 reflector ...

Regular expressions are like power tools: They may look scary, but are easy to use once you understand their basic building blocks. Regular expressions -- those scary strings that might as well be ...

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 ...

I have to admit that I've never really understood regular expressions. But if there was any reason that I was going to learn to use them, it would be when doing searches in Visual Studio. For one ...

For this work with regular expressions, we will start with a browser-based tool. Below is a list of file names. We want to write a regular expression that captures parts of each string. Copy the text ...

In programming, a set of symbols used to search for occurrences of text or to search and replace text. The simplest regular expressions are DOS/Windows wildcards; for example, *.html refers to all ...

How do you find out if a user has entered a valid email address? Do you check for an at-sign, or is it more complicated? For many developers the answer is a regular expression, a little bit of code ...

When working with regular expressions in a shell script the norm is to use grep or sed or some other external command/program. Since version 3 of bash (released in 2004) there is another option: ...