master regular expressions

For a long time, nearly 8 years now, I’ve known of and wanted to learn regular expressions. For about 6.5 of those years I couldn’t wrap my head around them. Then I got a job where I have to write some intermediate regexes nearly every day using Perl.

At first I really struggled even though I had plenty of examples and material to learn on. Then I discovered RegEx Buddy and I started to grok RegExes.

I can’t say that I’m a guru now but I can do most of what I need to now and I’d attribute most of it to the breakthroughs I’ve had using this simple tool.

<a.href=”([.])”.>([^<])</a>

all i wanted to do was be able to pull the link and the text out of an anchor tag, and be able to back reference it. This does the job, but seems somewhat inelegant.

I helped my boss with his mod-rewrite, and it took much more time than it should have.