#GREP REGEX REFERENCE HOW TO#

#GREP REGEX REFERENCE HOW TO#

This article assumes no prior knowledge of regular expressions, but you should understand how to with the Linux operating system at the command line. The article shows how you can use a regular expression to declare a pattern that you want to match, and outlines the essential building blocks of regular expressions, with many examples. This article examines the basics of using regular expressions under grep.

Regular expressions are supported by many programming languages, as well as classic command-line applications such as awk, sed, and grep, which were developed for Unix many decades ago and are now offered on GNU/Linux. You can also apply regular expressions to text that is subject to algorithmic processing at runtime such as content in HTTP requests or event messages. Once mastered, regular expressions provide developers with the ability to locate patterns of text in source code and documentation at design time. In this series, you'll learn more about how the syntax for this and other regular expressions work.Īs just demonstrated, a regex can be a powerful tool for finding text according to a particular pattern in a variety of situations. This example is but one of many uses for regular expressions. *, which matches any block of code text bracketed by tags, to the HTTP request body as part of your search for script injection code. Malicious code can appear in any number of ways, but you know that injected script code will always appear between HTML tags. For example, imagine you need to write code verifying that all content in the body of an HTTP POST request is free of script injection attacks.

Use of regular expressions in the real world can get much more complex-and powerful-than that. For instance, using regular expressions, you could find all the instances of the word cat in a document, or all instances of a word that begins with c and ends with t. A regular expression (also called a regex or regexp) is a rule that a computer can use to match characters or groups of characters within a larger body of text.

Grep regex reference