Regular expressions are sequences of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, not as some people would have you believe, devil code written by witchcraft practitioners. If you don’t know basic regex, you’re missing out. Get some knowledge in you!

If you have ever had to comb through a log or unformatted user input, you know why regex is an important skill. You can try splitting and replacing and joining and trimming strings to try to get stuff out of them, but more often than not, a nice clean regular expression is the tool that’s best for the job. Folks need to quit avoiding regex like it’s an alien that’s here to eat your brain, and embrace the unmatched power that it brings to string manipulation.