Regular expression use

[Nick Maclaren]

For reasons that I won't explain, as they are too complicated
and not terribly relevant, I am interested in discovering what
people actually use regular expressions for.  Not the subject
domain, but the construction of the regular expressions.

I know about computer scientists and parsing, and I know about
the use of relatively simple ones for things like extracting
HTML links from Web pages.  But I don't have much feel for the
(probably rare but difficult) uses of more complex ones for
other purposes.  I have heard of several such uses, but don't
have an overall idea of what is going on.

Any pointers appreciated, to more-or-less anything.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.