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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Not a guide to negotiating the back-to-school barbecue, but a handy guide to manipulating text. Ramsay answers key questions like: Why should I care? How can I improve my regex skills? Do I need ...

Regular expressions are like power tools: They may look scary, but are easy to use once you understand their basic building blocks. Regular expressions -- those scary strings that might as well be ...

Creating Web pages can be an exciting experience; after all, the Web is on the cutting edge when it comes to publishing technology. But when you have to update dozens of lines of code manually to make ...

Regular expressions give Tim Patrick the creeps, but he overcame his fears by discovering specially crafted regex patterns can access data in a way that’s actually kind of cool. I've always been ...

Regular expressions are a way to describe patterns of text that can be useful for processing text documents or wherever one might want to look for a pattern and possibly replace another. Imagine you ...

A monthly overview of things you need to know as an architect or aspiring architect.

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 ...