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Patterns review: Utility makes quick work of regular expressions

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<p>You know the maxim, “Give a man to fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”? A similar adage applies to anyone who spends a lot of time working with text on their Mac: Learn how to use regular expressions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expressions)—sequences of characters and variables that you can use to perform powerful searches—and you’ll benefit greatly, for a very long time.</p><p>I’ve saved hours or days—maybe even weeks—of time over the past decade or so by using pattern-matching search-and-replace actions on text. Regular expressions (also called regex or grep) form the common language that most programs use for these actions. Specifically, I’ve been using grep in BBEdit (http://www.macworld.com/article/1027276/regex.html), crafting complex patterns and then pressing the Find button and hoping that my pattern is right. But it isn’t always—learning regex takes practice and involves lots of trial and error.</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/2109200/patterns-review-utility-makes-quick-work-of-regular-expressions.html#jump">To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>

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