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 ...

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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 ...

I'm wearing my regex dunce cap again. I want to return a positive match if I find "this" in a string, but not if I find "this" and also "that" in the string. Put another way: I want to return a ...

This article explains what regex (or regular expressions) is and how to get started using it with web crawlers, plus some interesting real-world use cases. One technology skill that is too-often ...

You know the maxim, “Give a man to fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”? A similar adage applies to anyone who spends a lot of time working with text on their ...

When I’m writing in Editorial, I often need to make sure I’m dealing with a valid URL in the system clipboard, the document editor, or in a variable. To do so, I’ve long employed John Gruber’s liberal ...