With all respect, you're better off using a supportive regex environment that accepts your regex entries and quickly shows their effect on some example text you

With all respect, you're better off using a supportive regex environment that accepts your regex entries and quickly shows their effect on some example text you provide -- a builder/tester like this (just an example, there are many similar ones): http://www.arachnoid.com/regex_lab/ http://www.arachnoid.com/regex_lab/ Philosophically, there are two approaches to making regexes an effective tool -- expand regex syntax until it's so verbose that there's no possibility for confusion -- ironically a somewhat confusing tactic as this topic's comments demonstrate -- or learn native regex in an interactive way that shows its effect on example text, until you develop an instinct for it. I prefer the latter. It's like learning music by keyboard -- shall we paint each keyboard key a different color and recode sheet music to agree, or shall we use a teaching method that makes the keyboard gradually seem more natural?