Great series on regular expressions.

Just thought you would like to know that the two links to your tutor’s blog go to a 404 page

Cheers
George

[...] Regular Expressions Part III: Anchors ^ | Increasing your (Useful factoid: the people who work with Regular Expressions all the time call them RegEx. I have no idea how they make that plural.) [...]

^\contact\

???? Then yes. Congrats! Just want to ensure you didn’t mean to include the … as part of the regular expression.

Just be aware that if you have “\contact\you\” and didn’t want that to match, then your expression won’t work. Regular Expressions are not as simple as just what will match, but also ensuring you don’t get too much. Or don’t match too much.

Cheers!
- Steve
I do so enjoy having access to a comments rss feed.

Enjoy these posts. Thanks for doing this.

Laura

Hey Robbin,

Great post! I haven’t read the full series but plan to. I’m not sure if you’ve mentioned this, but there is a great RegEx testing tool. The RegEx Coach:

http://weitz.de/regex-coach/

Of course I prefer the tool on the EpikOne site, but I’m partial

Justin

Robbin

Plural?
For me it depends on context.

With one good friend (now a linux kernel hacker by day), I use “RE’s”.
At work I tend to use “RegEx’s”. When communicating with those who would not necessarilly appreciate or understand the shortening, I spell it out in full: “Regular Expressions”.

Naturally the prior use of the apostrophe is not to indicate ownership or annoy English majors, rather to forcibly separate the ‘s’ from the previous “word” and highlight the use of the plural form.

Additionally, as a single Regular Expression is frequently made up of multiple Regular Expressions; such a separation can be more descriptive of the intent.

Bad writing style, good email clarity.

Wikipedia offers:
regexps, regexes, or regexen

Tho I think the latter is purely to help the speaker sound educated.

Confused?

- Steve