Do you remember at least: . * | + ? ( ) This is 95% of it. After that, it's character classes and lazy matching. Character classes can often be given as ra

Do you remember at least: . * | + ? ( ) This is 95% of it. After that, it's character classes and lazy matching. Character classes can often be given as ranges: [a-z] [A-Z] [0-9] ^ $ You can use the pipe | to combine then. Lazy matching finds the shortest matching string instead of the longest one. This is given by the symbols: *? +? Instead of + and * respectively. > I only use it once per year If you use a text editor, any kind of repetitive find+replace activity can be sped up using regexes. Seems strange you only use it once per year. Some people tell you that you can't parse XML using regexes. THEY'RE WR- right, but you can often do decent one-off jobs on an XML document using regular expressions, as long as you're aware that it's a one-off job that won't work on any other document.