In my recent explorations into the world of writing “regular expressions” I came across a couple of different applications that are supposed to make it easier for you to write and test your expressions.

I didn’t have that much luck as the applications weren’t really as helpful as I had anticipated or really needed. It’s been awhile since I’ve come across something that’s made me feel completely ignorant, but regular expressions seems to be the winner lately.
The two apps I found are completely free and give you quite a bit of assistance and guidance for writing your “regular expression”, but I’m …read more

I’ve been spending a bit of time the last couple of days trying to figure out exactly how regular expressions work. I’ve got to use one in an application I’m working on and I’m just not getting the syntax organization at all.

Although you may think it’s gibberish, the text above is the regular expression I’m using for the solution to my earlier problem. Doesn’t look very "regular" does it? Aside from the fact it’s using characters I’m familiar with, the order and meaning behind them might as well be hieroglyphics to me. So, what is a "regular expression"?
The Wiktionary …read more

DOS has a few commands like find, findstr and sort which can be used to manipulate text. ($ help <cmd> shows the usage help for all these commands.) However, their usage is very different from those that a Unix user may be familiar with.
One of the best things about Cygwin is that these commands useful for “quick and dirty” work on large chunks of text data are easy to learn, are consistent across all Unix-based OSs, have a number of options, and are quite extensive. When used in combination, they can save a lot of programming.
($ <command> <option> <inputs> is …read more