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’ve programmed in Perl or any other language with built-in regular-expression capabilities, then you probably know how much easier regular expressions make text processing and pattern matching.

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 ...