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 ...

Java’s character and assorted string classes offer low-level support for pattern matching, but that support typically leads to complex code. For simpler and more efficient coding, Java offers the ...

The people who attended my presentations at RMOUG Training Days 2010 asked several good questions. One question that was asked in the Groovy presentation that I really wish I had included a slide on ...

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 ...

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 ...

Regular expressions have been part of the programmer’s toolkit for a long time, with their creation by Stephen Cole King in 1951. Their ability to match word patterns make them a powerful tool for ...

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 ...