Wow, this is a loaded question. Some of our favorite software tools give us the ability to use a Regular Expression in the search. But what is a Regular Expression? To explain this, let’s describe a problem. You are working in a document and you realize that all of the numbers in the document that are greater than 200 are too high and you need to decrease them by 100. Now how on Earth can you do this? Using a find will only give you one number… if you can find it, however, there may be a range of numbers that you need to find. This is where are Regular Expression can help you…
Xcode, one of my favorite development tools, uses the ICU library for regular expressions. Luckily, they have a website dedicated on Regular Expression usage: http://www.icu-project.org/userguide/regexp.html
For developers who use Visual Studio, check out this website:
http://regexlib.com/CheatSheet.aspx
Still confused? Submit a comment and maybe we can help you 🙂
My co-worker pointed me to another great site that has information about how to use regular expressions! Check it out:
http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlre.html