[ Thanks to Paul K
Egell-Johnsen for this link. ]
“This article will give you an introduction to the world of
regular expressions. I’ll start off with explaining what regular
expressions are and introduce it’s syntax, then some examples with
varying complexity and last a list of tools which use regular
expressions.“
“A regular expression is a text pattern consisting of a
combination of alphanumeric characters and special characters known
as metacharacters. A close relative is in fact the wildcard
expression which are often used in file management. The pattern is
used to match against text strings. The result of a match is either
successful or not, however when a match is successful not all of
the pattern must match, this is explained later in the
article.”
“You’ll find that regular expressions are used in three
different ways: Regular text match, search and replace and
splitting. The latter is basicly the same as the reverse match ie.
everything the regular expression did not match.”