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 ...

If you consider yourself a good cook, you may or may not know how to make a souffle or baklava. But there are certain things you probably do know how to do that form the basis of many recipes. For ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Bash has quietly made scripting on Unix systems a lot easier with its own regular expressions. If you're still leaning on grep and sed commands to get your scripts to do what you need from them, maybe ...

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 ...

[Nicholas Carlini] found some extra time on his hands over the holiday, so he decide to do something with “entirely no purpose.” The result: 84,688 regular expressions that can play chess using a ...

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: ...