Regular expressions give Tim Patrick the creeps, but he overcame his fears by discovering specially crafted regex patterns can access data in a way that’s actually kind of cool. I've always been ...

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 are the secret weapon for searching, validating, and transforming text across almost every programming language. From quick data validation to massive log parsing, regex can save ...

Regular expressions are a universal tool for matching, validating, and transforming text across programming languages and command-line tools. They can condense complex string operations into compact, ...

A quick run down on how you can use regular expressions in your own programs to give you more power over searching and substituting text. Perl has long been an extremely popular choice for text ...

A regex construct, specified as a backslash character () followed by a digit character denoting a capturing group number, that recalls a capturing group’s captured text characters.

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 ...

Mark Gibbs is very impressed with a service that generates code for regular expressions and he has found that Gmail now supports importing and exporting filters. His happiness knows no bounds. Before ...

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 ...