4.8.7 The regular expressions coachThis is NOT the latest copy of this book; click here for the latest version.
Although there is no doubt that regular expressions are incredibly useful, they also easily get out of hand when trying to match complex strings. Furthermore, anything past twelve or so characters gets hard to read and understand, which is a common source of bugs.
To work around this problem, I suggest you use an excellent program called the Regex Coach, available from www.weitz.de/regex-coach - it is free to use non-commercially, and is able to help you check your regular expressions are correct by visually highlighting strings that match. The Coach is fully compatible with all the options shown here, including string replacement, and can even break down a regexp and describe it in plain English.
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