Comparing file paths, urls and words (or literals) to regular expressions (regex) can be confusing and particularly confusing when special characters are included in the pattern. Some characters like /, +, ., ?, (, ), [, ] and \ have special meanings which will vary by regular expression syntax and by programming language. For instance,…

The use of regular expressions (regex) for matching, searching, validating, and replacing text has powerful capabilities. In use in JavaScript applications, APIs, in configuration files and JSON based systems. One common problem, however, that developers may encounter is that a regex pattern may require additional backslashes to function properly. For instance you can match a…

Regular expressions, (regex) are brilliant patterns for searching, matching, validating and replacing text data in programming languages including JavaScript, Python, PHP and Java. But it’s possible to get special characters confused, particularly in the case of special character escaping in a pattern and a replacement. A common pitfall that developers tend to get is mixing…