If you’re a programmer who has ever had to develop an
application dealing with text input (which is most of them),
from files, databases, or user input, you might be interested to
know that regular expressions can make your job a lot easier.
Unlike most dry regular expressions tutorials out there (Mike’s
smart post aside), I intend to provide more than just the
“what”; I’ll walk you through the “how” and “why” too. After
all, why would you care to learn regular expressions if you
don’t get to find out about some of the cool and powerful things
you can do with them? In most programming languages, there exist
certain simple and useful functions that people come to rely
upon. From my days with Perl, chomp was one of those functions
for me. Given a string, chomp bit off all newline characters at
the end of the string (and returned the number of newline
characters it removed).