REGEX is a smarter version of Excel's FIND function, which works well for basic lookups. However, REGEX handles more complex ...

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 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 ...

The awk command is a versatile text-processing tool in Linux. It filters and manipulates files using patterns, conditions, ...

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 ...

Whether you are parsing logs or validating input, using regular expressions is a great way to accomplish both of these things. The problem is: regular expressions can be hard and that will only grow ...

Not a guide to negotiating the back-to-school barbecue, but a handy guide to manipulating text. Ramsay answers key questions like: Why should I care? How can I improve my regex skills? Do I need ...

I have to admit that I've never really understood regular expressions. But if there was any reason that I was going to learn to use them, it would be when doing searches in Visual Studio. For one ...

Regular expressions — the things you feed to programs like grep — are a bit like riding a bike. It seems impossible until you learn to do it, and then it’s easy. Part of their bad reputation is ...

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: ...