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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Regular expressions — the things you feed to programs like grep — are a bit like riding a bike. It seems impossible until you learn to do it, and then it’s easy. Part of their bad reputation is ...

Regular expressions are a powerful computing tool, with near-mythical status in some programming circles (here is one of my favorite online comic series’ take on ...

Even though it has somewhat of a checkered reputation, being able to wield it will save you a ton of time. There's a saying that I've heard numerous times about regular expressions (regex). It goes ...

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 ...

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: ...

The reflector DBM can be asked to search for a common name by means of a Basic UNIX regular expression applied to all common names known to the DBM. A regular expression search is useful when part of ...