I am using them since my Perl-days … so I found this a great introduction with hidden gems1! Also check out the online-tool from Lea Verou for playing around with regular expressions online: http://leaverou.github.io/regexplained/.
Regular expression
A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. Regular expression techniques are developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory.
The concept of regular expressions began in the 1950s, when the American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene formalized the concept of a regular language. They came into common use with Unix text-processing utilities. Different syntaxes for writing regular expressions have existed since the 1980s, one being the POSIX standard and another, widely used, being the Perl syntax.
Regular expressions are used in search engines, in search and replace dialogs of word processors and text editors, in text processing utilities such as sed and AWK, and in lexical analysis. Regular expressions are supported in many programming languages. Library implementations are often called an "engine", and many of these are available for reuse.
Definition from Wikipedia – Regular expression
Lea Verou
Lea Verou (Greek: Λία Βέρου) is a Greek-American computer scientist, front end web developer, speaker and author, originally from Lesbos, Greece. Verou is currently a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), an elected participant in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Technical Architecture Group (TAG), and an invited expert in the W3C CSS Working Group.
She is the author of the book CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems (ISBN 978-1-449-37263-7).
Definition from Wikipedia – Lea Verou
- recommendation via Andre Michelle ↩