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 ...

Regular expressions have been part of the programmer’s toolkit for a long time, with their creation by Stephen Cole King in 1951. Their ability to match word patterns make them a powerful tool for ...

Regular expressions can seem complex but the biggest reason for this is that most programmers don't take them seriously enough. Spend just a little time finding out how they work and you can do ...

Of course we now have the problem that it isn’t unreasonable for an ISBN to be written as ISBN: 9 or ISBN:9 with perhaps even more than one space after the colon. We clearly need a way to specify the ...

In the Star Wars universe, not everyone uses a lightsaber, and those who do wield them had to build them themselves. There’s something to be said about that strategy. Building a car or a radio is a ...

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause analysis of its ...