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 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 ...

I once asked a software developer at work how many times we called fork() in our code. I’ll admit, it was a very large project, but I expected the answer to be — at most — two digits. The developer ...

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 ...

Vincent Danen goes over some basic regular expressions. They are handy for developers and programmers, of course, and can even be employed for Google searching. As a Linux user or administrator, the ...

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 ...

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 ...

You can do a lot more with regular expressions than you think. In this tutorial, you'll use it to convert a movie list into a CSV file for use in Excel. In Part 1 and Part 2 in this series about ...

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 ...