I began to understand Regex after reading the awk chapter in Masterminds of Programming. After that I understood how "the machine" inside might work. I really u

I began to understand Regex after reading the awk chapter in Masterminds of Programming. After that I understood how "the machine" inside might work. I really understood how to apply Regex to single strings after I started to see a regex as a "mask", so very similar to your wildcard approach.