Regular expression use

[anno4000 at radom.zrz.tu-berlin.de]

Nick Maclaren <nmm1 at cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
> 
> For reasons that I won't explain, as they are too complicated
> and not terribly relevant,

Your reasons are relevant as a motivation for your readers to
answer such a broad question.

> I am interested in discovering what
> people actually use regular expressions for.  Not the subject
> domain, but the construction of the regular expressions.

How is the construction of a regex related to what it is used
for?  That makes no sense.

> I know about computer scientists and parsing,

That's a (broad) subject domain.

> and I know about
> the use of relatively simple ones for things like extracting
> HTML links from Web pages.

That's another subject domain (and a regex for that purpose wouldn't
qualify as "relatively simple").

> 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.

Your question is so badly defined, it would take considerable effort
just to make sense of it.  Given your premise of "Never mind what I
need it for, just gimme the info," I won't even try.

Anno