What is it with the obsession with regular expressions? They are useful things, sure, but I just use them in connection with grep or if I search for strings and normally they are pretty basic, e.g.
$ grep -r -n --color "foo*bar" src
If I want to validate input data with the machine I just use a parser.
$ grep -r -n --color "foo*bar" src
If I want to validate input data with the machine I just use a parser.