Regular expressions are an essential part of any programmer’s toolkit. They can be very handy when you need to identify, replace or modify text, words, patterns or characters. In a nutshell: regular expressions (regex) are like a Swiss army knife for modifying strings of just about anything. Need to make your site URLs look pretty? Use regex. Need to remove all punctuation from a sentence? Definitely use regex. The uses for regular expressions are almost limitless.
