Regular expression (nonfiction)

A regular expression, regex or regexp (sometimes called a rational expression) is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. Usually this pattern is used by string searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. It is a technique developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory.

The concept arose in the 1950s when the American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene formalized the description of a regular language. The concept came into common use with Unix text-processing utilities. Since the 1980s, different syntaxes for writing regular expressions exist, one being the POSIX standard and another, widely used, being the Perl syntax.

Regular expressions are used in search engines, search and replace dialogs of word processors and text editors, in text processing utilities such as sed and AWK and in lexical analysis.

Many programming languages provide regex capabilities, built-in or via libraries.

Examples

Remove pairs of square brackets and their contents:

\[[^\[]*\]

Source: Stack Overflow

Fiction cross-reference

• Can This Regex Be Saved? - reality television program
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Stephen Cole Kleene (nonfiction) - inventor of regular expressions
• Regular language (nonfiction)

External links:

• Regular expression @ Wikipedia