Textbending with Regular Expression

When we use tools like sed, awk, or grep to control, organize, or find information in the console, we do what is called text manipulation. However, I like to call this skill something a that we can use in the form of a verb or a single noun: textbending.

When we textbend, we take information in one form and convert it to another according to our needs.

Applications that use textbending will often use regular expression or regex or RE. REs are used to process a command multiple times based on whether the input string matches the pattern defined by the RE string.

See Also

• Bash
• Perl
• [sed and awk](The Bash Brothers sed and awk)
• [grep and find](Searching using grep and find)
• Vim

External Links (Lots of them!)

• http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_04_01.html - the Bash guide for RE.
• http://www.regular-expressions.info/
• http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_regexp.asp - Learn how to use RE for JavaScript
• http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html - for PERL
• http://regexone.com/ - Interactive tutorial
• http://vimregex.com/ - for Vim

Fiddle-like Sites

On these sites you can try out a regular expression

• http://www.regexr.com/
• https://regex101.com/
• http://rubular.com/ - for testing REs for Ruby
• http://regexpal.com/ - for testing REs for JavaScript