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Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions is a name given to a way of matching text strings with a specially-coded pattern.  You can really think of regular expressions as another language.  Various programming and scripting languages (e.g. Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, JavaScript*, C, C#, Visual Basic, Java) can recognize this language/code and help you find what you're looking for.

Sample Text String
Congratulations, Phil Smith, your social security number is 123-45-6789.  Be sure to keep it safe.

If you were to want to search through that text string and find the social security number, a RegEx can make your job much easier.  The following RegEx will find the social in the above text string.

[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}

RegEx Insight

The following guidelines will help you as you learn to work with RE's...

Sample RegEx for email addresses

^(([[:alnum:]!##-'*+-/=?^`{-~]+(.[[:alnum:]!##-'*+-/=?^`{-~]+)*)|(.+))@((([[:alnum:]]+[[:alnum:]-]*[[:alnum:]]+.)+[[:alpha:]]{2,7}))$

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