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 ...

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 can seem complex but the biggest reason for this is that most programmers don't take them seriously enough. Spend just a little time finding out how they work and you can do ...

In the Star Wars universe, not everyone uses a lightsaber, and those who do wield them had to build them themselves. There’s something to be said about that strategy. Building a car or a radio is a ...

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause analysis of its ...

Of course we now have the problem that it isn’t unreasonable for an ISBN to be written as ISBN: 9 or ISBN:9 with perhaps even more than one space after the colon. We clearly need a way to specify the ...