Do you have data and lists you keep having to massage to make it useful for your project? Have you heard of regular expressions but been frightened by the Klingon-looking examples? Fear no longer!

I’ll demystify regular expressions and show you how best to do them in PHP. We’ll cover the syntax and functions that make PHP a great text-parsing language, and give you the foundation to learn more.

As a bonus, I’ll give you two cases people often use as examples for regexes that PHP gives you better native ways to accomplish.