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 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 ...

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 ...

Let’s say we need a JavaScript function that will take a string of tagged text (that is, it contains Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup) and return only the tags (and not the text that the tags ...

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 might seem arcane, but if you do any kind of software, they are a powerful hacker tool. Obviously, if you are writing software or using tools like grep, awk, sed, Perl, or just ...