Smashing Magazine ~ we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really. – Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials
an essential part of any programmer’s toolkit. They can be very handy when you need to identify, replace or modify text, words, patterns or characters. In a nutshell: regular expressions (regex) are like a Swiss army knife for modifying strings of just about anything. Need to make your site URLs look pretty? Use regex. Need to remove all punctuation from a sentence? Definitely use regex. The uses for regular expressions are almost limitless.
It is programming against text and it can get complex and very difficult to read. The article has a number of links to quick reference cards and tutorials that will help learn and use regular expressions. Not every editor or string processing language uses exactly the same syntax. That is why the reference to Comparison of Regular Expression Engines at Wikipedia is useful.
Powerful tools need a bit of work to learn to use properly and they also need careful attention to safeguards!
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