Regular Expressions

A regular expression, sometimes also referred to RegExp or regex, is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern. Usually these patterns are used to search text or a file that is passed into a string searching program or algorithm. Regular expressions are important to know because sometimes when you are working with computers you will need to a find a specific pattern of text and regular expressions will allow you to define how this pattern should look. You can think of regular expressions as wildcards (*.txt) on steroids.