Collaborate Disseminate
There are two types of people in the world: those who have no idea what a regular expression is, and those who not only know what they are but can …read more Continue reading Regular Expressions Finally Come to Microsoft Excel
I once asked a software developer at work how many times we called fork() in our code. I’ll admit, it was a very large project, but I expected the answer …read more Continue reading Linux Fu: Globs vs Regexp
Being an editor is a job that seems deceptively easy until you are hauled over the coals for letting a textual howler go to print (or website). Most publications have style guides to ensure that their individual voice is preserved, …read more
Continue reading 13,000 Regular Expressions Make An Editor’s Life Easier
In the Star Wars universe, not everyone uses a lightsabe, and those who do wield them had to build them themselves. There’s something to be said about that strategy. Building a car or a radio is a great way to learn how those things work. That’s what [Low Level JavaScript] …read more
awk is a kind of Swiss Army knife for text files. However, some of its limitations are often a bit annoying. I’ve used a simple set of functions to make awk a bit better, although I will warn you: it does require GNU extensions to awk. That is, you …read more
Regular expressions — the things you feed to programs like grep — are a bit like riding a bike. It seems impossible until you learn to do it, and then it’s easy. Part of their bad reputation is because they use a very concise and abbreviated syntax that alarms people. …read more
We aren’t sure how we feel about [pemistahl’s] grex program. On the one hand, we applaud a program that can take some input samples and produce a regular expression. On the other hand, it might be just as hard to gather example data that produces the correct regular expression. Still, …read more
If you consider yourself a good cook, you may or may not know how to make a souffle or baklava. But there are certain things you probably do know how to do that form the basis of many recipes. For example, you can probably boil water, crack an egg, and brown meat. With Linux or Unix systems, you can make the same observation. You might not know how to set up a Wayland server or write a kernel module. But there are certain core skills like file manipulation and editing that will serve you no matter what you do. One …read more