by bobkoure » Mon Mar 26, 2007 10:25 am
Yeah - but I didn't mean as specific as that.
For instance, I'd guess the most useful thing for regex newbies is just knowing that '.', '*', and '?' don't do what you think.
And the second most useful thing is '\b'.
So let me add that one, in a semi-generic way:
If you are looking through a newsgroup and you want to find (either for inclusion or exclusion) a short word that's often "buried" in other words, use the "word boundary" marker '\b'
For instance, if you're looking for the string "no" then filtering for just that gets you
no
as well as
_no_
nowhere
nothing
nottingham
noblese
north
etc
However, filtering for "\bno\b" gets you
no
no6
_no_
- but the words containing "no" are gone.