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 ...

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 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 ...

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 -- ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...