Aron Pilhofer's blog
Regex: Search and replace on steroids
Posted December 9th, 2008 by Aron PilhoferOf all the tools and techniques that have been brought to bear on the pursuit of computer-assisted reporting, few have been more useful, I've found, than regular expressions. Regexes are among the tools I find myself using on an almost daily basis.
Although there is a learning curve to be sure, I believe it is worth it. Once you learn the basics of regular expressions, you'll view the hours spent constructing elaborate string functions or embedded if/then statements as quite literally time wasted.
