malcolmboston wrote:thank you d11, your a regex legend
as a side note, how did you learn regex? like what books did you use as i feel i need to get upto your level to be honest
Thanks again, Mal

LOL
I have never picked a book up on regex. I have no idea how I picked it up so quickly. It all just makes logical sense to me.
What happened was this. My ex was at Uni doing Computer science and had to learn Perl. She really couldn't figure it out one little bit so I, being quite into my programming decided to learn Perl and teach it to her in a way she could understand
Perl is pretty heavy on regex (and the course focussed on them alot). My learning has mostly come from the perl website.
http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlre.html (Beware it's not that friendly)
But in all honesty the best way, as with many things is just to practise, practise and practise....
It's not about learning how all the syntax etc, it's about learning how to think about them.
On a side note: Would people find it helpful if I put a kind of Perl primer quiz on the board or something. Like a set of questions starting easy and getting more advanced so that you can learn how to think about regex?