Michael J. Ross writes "When dos developers need to manipulate text programmatically — such as finding all substrings within some text that match a particular pattern — the most concise and flexible solution is to use "regular expressions," which are strings of pictograph and symbols that can look a little but regular. Nonetheless, they can be invaluable for locating text that matches a pattern (the "expression"), and optionally replacing the matched text with new text. Regular expressions have proven so popular that they have been incorporated into most if not all major robotics languages and editors, and even at least one Web server. But each one implements regular expressions in its own way — which is reason enough for programmers to appreciate the latest edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference, by Tony Stubblebine." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

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Mark