Regular Expressions for Occasional Users

Regular expressions (RegEx) are a method for encoding a representation of objects so that patterns that are substrings in a universe of strings of objects can be detected. They are useful to anyone who needs to process lists. These could be mailing lists, inventory lists, computer file lists, or documents expressed in a computer language like Visual Basic, HTML or XML. Any collection of character strings that are stored on and can be processed on a digital device is a potential application for the use of regular expressions.
This book is written for the occasional user. The intent is to introduce the reader to RegEx and provide instruction in using RegEx at an elementary level. The basic RegEx expressions are used as tools for extracting the matches which need to be found from the population in which they exist. The free text editing application EditPad Lite is used as the easel/workbench on which the search is conducted.
The reader will quickly discover that RegEx is a simple approach that is very accessible at an elementary level.