Regular Expressions

15 July 2005

I've added a page to my site explaining regular expressions, in the UNIX / Linux pages.
"Regular expressions are a way of manipulating text by using character strings and metacharacters. They are often used by programmers, but can also be used in shell commands and in some programs (e.g. vi and other text editors). "

Regular expressions tend to be something you avoid like the plague until you really need to use them; then, once you start using them you wonder how you ever did without them. I've been using them for a few years now and I find that there is so much more I can do, and it takes a fraction of the code that would be required to do them manually.

The main reason for this is that I am wanting to add some information on the mod_rewrite module in Apache, which uses regular expressions. I found that when I was trying to understood rewrites the document was a bit too detailed and hard to follow especially if you just wanted to do something simple.

If you are interested in a basic introduction to mod_rewrite in apache then come back in a few days time, if you want to know some more about regular expressions follow the link below:

Basic introduction to regular expressions.