Regular Expression Matching
Michael Hyman, Phani Vaddadi · Apress eBooks · 1999
regular expression matching is one of our favorite examples because it is chock-full of techniques. Regular expression matching provides a powerful way to examine strings. Instead of looking for exact matches, such as “Is the value of the string foo” or even “Does the string contain the substring foo,” regular expression matching lets you find patterns. For example, you could look for strings that start with f or strings that start with f and then contain a sequence of one or more bar substrings. You can look for very sophisticated patterns.