Whenever I ask a group of developers if they are familiar with regular expressions, I seem to get at least half the responses along the lines of "I've used them, but I don't like them". Call me a geek if you like, but I quite like regex; I think often it seems unfriendly because it's used inappropriately or just thrown into code with "here be dragons" type comments rather than documentation about what should match, and what shouldn't!

As with most things, it's pretty easy when you know how, so here's my one-step-at-a-time approach to regex (stolen from my ZCE preparation tutorial slides). Let's begin at the very beginning: regular expressions have delimiters, usually a slash character, and these contain a pattern that describes a string.

Here, we've got an expression that describes something containing the letter "b", followed by any one of the vowels (a,e,i,o and u), followed by the letter "t"; so long as those three items appear in a string, then it will match this expression.

Use a hypen to denote ranges of characters:

These examples show matching a selection of characters, including character ranges. Look out for the wildcard, which is a dot - if you wanted to match a dot (for example in a domain name), you will need to escape it with the backslash.

The quantifier goes after the character (or character range) to say how many of something there should be. You can give precise numbers of occurrences, ranges, or use the ? (0 or 1), + (1 or more) or * (0 or more) characters:

We can also anchor our patterns to the beginning and ends of lines using ^ and $ respectively (or \A and \Z for multiline strings). This means that:

To remember all the various characters, I use this excellent regex cheat sheet from addedbytes.com, which has been printed out and pinned over my desk pretty much everywhere I've worked in recent memory.