Come for a “brief bite” on how to start constructing regular expressions to search for complicated patterns in text.

Regular expressions are a powerful means of searching for complicated text patterns. A simple find operation can select all instances of the phrase “9 cats” in a text, but regular expressions allow a person to select all instances of “cats” preceded by any number, and only in cases where “cats” is followed by a comma, a semi-colon, or a period.

Come for a “brief bite” on how to start constructing regular expressions in your text editor, Microsoft Word, or other piece of software.