I kind of know regular expressions but every time I have to write one I head off to regexpal to write it. For instance, off the top of my head, I have no idea w

I kind of know regular expressions but every time I have to write one I head off to regexpal to write it. For instance, off the top of my head, I have no idea what the "?" in the parenthesis does. Usually expect a character to precede a "?", "." or "*". I also don't use them often enough to commit all the rules to memory. However, given VerbalExpressions, I don't think I'd have a problem building regular expressions. For a newbie, startOfLine and endOfLine is far more memorable than "^" and "$". > Which you should if you are a programmer. You can be pretty productive programmer without knowing regular expressions. Depends on the kind of programming you do really.