A Tao of Regular Expressions

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A regular expression is a formula for matching strings that follow some pattern. Many people are afraid to use them because they can look confusing and complicated. Unfortunately, nothing in this write up can change that. However, I have found that with a bit of practice, it's pretty easy to write these complicated expressions. Plus, once you get the hang of them, you can reduce hours of laborious and error-prone text editing down to minutes or seconds. Regular expressions are supported by many text editors, class libraries such as Rogue Wave's Tools.h++, scripting tools such as awk, grep, sed, and increasingly in interactive development environments such as Microsoft's Visual C++.