Sentence examples for regexp from inspiring English sources

Any search that involves more than a few criteria is almost certainly easier to put into a regexp, even if your recollection of the specifics is fuzzy enough that you need to quickly look up some syntax online.

Knowing regexp can mean the difference between solving a problem in three steps and solving it in 3,000 steps.

Regexps are easy to teach with games, since each "operator" in a regular expression blocks or matches a different set of characters, so you can easily make tower-defence style games where the player has to construct progressively more complex regexps to block the incoming monsters – there are tons of regexp games online already.

Like typing or spelling, regexp is a foundational skill that involves a fair bit of practice and learning by rote.

One of my favourites is "regular expressions" (also called regex or regexp).

I think that technical people underestimate how useful regexps are for "normal" people, whether a receptionist labouriously copy-pasting all the surnames from a word-processor document into a spreadsheet, a school administrator trying to import an old set of school records into a new system, or a mechanic hunting through a parts list for specific numbers.

So far as I can tell, no school ICT class yet bothers with them, despite the fact that regexps organise so much of our underlying infrastructure and can make such an enormous difference to the lives of everyday people, even those who don't code.

The reason technical people forget this is that once you know regexps, they become second nature.

Word processors, search-engines, blogging programs … though it's been decades since software for everyday people was designed with the assumption that users would know regexps, they still lurk in practically every environment we use.