Help with Regex (was Re: Switch, Case and wild-cards?)

[James Hale]

Pete asked: 
"Does anyone have any references to using regular expressions, preferable
with lots of examples?"

If you are using a Mac i suggest getting yourself a copy of BBedit or its free sibling "TextWrangler".
I have never been much for using terminal commands and the like as I always preferred the Mac GUI so when it came to text manipulation I sought out easier tools. Nisus was my first taste of using regex with its token substitutions but when it when in to abeyance for a while I turned to BBedit.
It allows the use of grep ( a command line regex tool) in its find and replace dialog and also does find and replace across multiple files. It's manual provides a good introduction to what you can do with regex, it is blindingly fast and a really easily way to try out different expressions.
I found it invaluable when I wrote a web-scrapping app to provide a back end to my DVD collection many years ago. I still have times when I need to do a lot of text manipulation and will inevitably turn to BBedit's regex prowess to do the heavy lifting.
As for references, there are lots on the web and O'Reilly have a couple of good books.
But BBEDIT (or TextWrangler) will provide an easily accessible interface into using regex and trying out different things.

James