Can someone suggest a way to learn regex?

Posted by Nick Brooks on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Nick Brooks
Published on 2010-05-03T14:38:28Z Indexed on 2010/05/03 14:48 UTC
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regex

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learning

In my situation knowing Regex would be very useful but I can't seem to be able to learn it. I completely don't understand it and I find it quite strange.

To me Regex is just a set of jumbled up symbols which 'somehow' does the job. I looked at many tutorials and still haven't figured how to use it.

The other thing I find weird that whenever I search for a way to implement something with regex I find lots of different solutions. For example these are for 'matching text between the brackets'

1: \((.*?)\)

2: ((.+?))

That confuses me even more ...

Can someone suggest a good way of learning it? Personally I find it even more difficult than assembly language.

For now I'm avoiding Regex and using things such as "substr" to get the bits I need.

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