They are fastВ - faster than the recursive cruft required to not write regex, for sure. This is useful because regular expressions can match just about any pattern. What the Hell Even Is a Regular Expression? And Why Should I Care?ДЄccording to good olвЂ™ Mozilla Developer Network, вЂњRegular Expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings.вЂќ Yes, strings as in text orВ - as the authors of Programming Perl point outВ - вЂњIf you take вЂtextвЂ™ in the widest possible sense, perhaps 90 percent of what you do is 90 percent text processing.вЂќ Specifically, a surprisingly powerful search pattern language that can save any programmer who understands how it works one heck of a lot of time. Slowly, though, it became obvious that those workarounds were more painful than actually buckling down and figuring out what is, after all, just another computer language. I figured there had to be workarounds for any situation that might call for using regular expressions. Also I already felt overloaded just trying to grasp JavaScript and Node.js. I could stumble through the basics when absolutely necessary but avoided actually learning it for real. While on meth).ДЇor the longest time, I was one of those people ridiculously intimidated by regex. All kinds of people, even experienced coders, avoid these freaky-deaky strings of characters that look like chicken tracks (if said chicken happened to be ice skating. Do regular expressions secretly terrify you? DonвЂ™t worry, you can admit it - fear of regex is not some shameful quirk you need to keep hidden.

Regex caret symbol