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 ...

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 ...

I was involved in a recent discussion on the "best" way to remove a given parameter from a URL string. The conversation began with using string primitives to split and join the parameter, a method ...

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 ...

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 ...

Regular expressions are like power tools: They may look scary, but are easy to use once you understand their basic building blocks. Regular expressions -- those scary strings that might as well be ...

How do you find out if a user has entered a valid email address? Do you check for an at-sign, or is it more complicated? For many developers the answer is a regular expression, a little bit of code ...

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.

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 ...