The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions
Slight terminological quibble:<p><i>Regular expressions are strings formatted using a special pattern notation that allow you to describe and parse text.</i><p>"Parse" is a questionable word choice. A proper Regular Expression can only describe patterns found in "regular languages", though modern backtracking regex engines have a bit more power. Parsing implies a <i>parser</i>, which means matching a grammar somewhat more sophisticated than a regex engine can handle.