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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Bash has quietly made scripting on Unix systems a lot easier with its own regular expressions. If you're still leaning on grep and sed commands to get your scripts to do what you need from them, maybe ...

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: ...