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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Quick: If you shout "regular expressions" in a crowd of Linux users, what happens? Answer: Everyone will tell you the right way to use them, and every answer will be different. Regular expressions -- ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...