MIchael’s presentation was an excellent crash course in regular expressions. He hit the main points and generated quite a bit of interest in the class. In fact, there were even people sitting on the floor.

The main points that I gathered from the class where that regular expressions:

• Matches patterns of characters
• Non-special characters are matched literally in the expression
• A period is a control character that matches ANY other character.
• A collection of non-control characters matches another collection of non-control characters
• Using the caret (⁾ will ensure that you are matching at the start of the string, whereas using the dollar sign, will ensure that you are matching at the end of the string
• RegEx ranges of characters (the range is defined by the list of ascii character in their numerical order (such as at AsciiTable.com) and used in side a set of square brackets ( [ ] )
• Multipliers allow you to match anywhere between 0-n, or 1-n or anything in between of a set of expressions
• Finally, Michael talked about a couple of other things such as POSIX expressions, that are a little more readable.