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 ...

How to use the regular expression functions provided by the ‘re’ library to match, search, and replace text in your Python programs. Regular expressions, or “regex,” is a system for finding complex ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Even though it has somewhat of a checkered reputation, being able to wield it will save you a ton of time. There's a saying that I've heard numerous times about regular expressions (regex). It goes ...

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: ...

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 ...