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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In programming, a set of symbols used to search for occurrences of text or to search and replace text. The simplest regular expressions are DOS/Windows wildcards; for example, *.html refers to all ...

Validation of input(e.g check the format of an email address) Match patterns in text files (e.g finding a word/phrase in a document) Compilers checking syntax A regular expressions are often known as ...

I first heard about regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerabilities from GitHub's Dependabot. Several of my projects over the years have had dependencies that suffered from ReDoS ...

Imagine you are looking for a name in a telephone directory, but you can't remember its exact spelling. You can spend ages searching through all the possible combinations, unless you have a tool that ...

[Nicholas Carlini] found some extra time on his hands over the holiday, so he decide to do something with “entirely no purpose.” The result: 84,688 regular expressions that can play chess using a ...