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 ...

In the Star Wars universe, not everyone uses a lightsaber, and those who do wield them had to build them themselves. There’s something to be said about that strategy. Building a car or a radio is a ...

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, ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...