Regular Expressions

While not a full programming language, regular expressions fulfill an important role in most modern operating systems. They provide a text-based method for describing textual patterns that can be used for search and replace or extraction operations on text files. They are tremendously flexible and fast, but are difficult to master.

This user manual is not going to attempt to teach Regular Expressions since there are other great resources and entire books devoted to the subject. Instead, we will offer some great links and resources you may find helpful when beginning to learn.

• RegexOne is a website that guides you through learning regular expressions at your own pace.
• Reggy is a useful app for OS X that helps you write and test regular expressions.
• regular-expressions.info is a great website with a lot of resources and tutorials.