If you’ve programmed in Perl or any other language with built-in regular-expression capabilities, then you probably know how much easier regular expressions make text processing and pattern matching.

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 ...

Not a guide to negotiating the back-to-school barbecue, but a handy guide to manipulating text. Ramsay answers key questions like: Why should I care? How can I improve my regex skills? Do I need ...

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 ...

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 ...

Whether you are parsing logs or validating input, using regular expressions is a great way to accomplish both of these things. The problem is: regular expressions can be hard and that will only grow ...

Custom segments are powerful tools used for a variety of reporting. Combined with regular expressions, segments can be customized to track a variety of searches, or return certain pages based on URL ...

Imagine you are looking for a name in a telephone directory, but you can't remember its exact spelling. You can spend ages searching through all the possible combinations, unless you have a tool that ...

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 ...