May 20, 2006

May 06 Meeting - Regular Expressions

A regular expression (abbreviated as regexp or regex), often called a pattern, is a string that describes or matches a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. They are usually used to give a concise description of a set, without having to list all elements.

Many text editors and utilities use them to search and manipulate bodies of text based on certain patterns as well as many programming languages for string manipulation.Check out this great article (.pdf) by Tom Dell' Aringa which reviews what we covered today as well as this neat cheat sheet by Dave Child. There are also many books on this topic if you want to learn more.