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 ...

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 ...

The people who attended my presentations at RMOUG Training Days 2010 asked several good questions. One question that was asked in the Groovy presentation that I really wish I had included a slide on ...

Creating Web pages can be an exciting experience; after all, the Web is on the cutting edge when it comes to publishing technology. But when you have to update dozens of lines of code manually to make ...

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 ...

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 ...

[Nicholas Carlini] found some extra time on his hands over the holiday, so he decide to do something with “entirely no purpose.” The result: 84,688 regular expressions that can play chess using a ...

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 ...

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: ...