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 ...

Let’s say we need a JavaScript function that will take a string of tagged text (that is, it contains Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup) and return only the tags (and not the text that the tags ...

Regular expressions come in handy for all varieties of text processing, but are often misunderstood--even by veteran developers. Here's a look at intermediate-level regular expressions and what they ...

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 ...

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 ...

These are the formal rules for forming basic UNIX regular expressions. For some simple examples, skip to Simple Examples. The rules come from the Solaris 7 regexp(5) manual page. The I2A2 reflector ...

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: ...