Apologies for the recent inactivity at PHPkitchen, your dedicated editor was dutifully searching out interesting new material at PHPCON 2002

Regular expressions tend to be neglected. Many people fear them and prefer to ignore their existence. However, disregarding regular expressions can leave a huge gap in your programming potential. By learning the basics you can tap into that lost potential and start producing more powerful code. Today we will examine the basics and put them to use in a practical situation.

Thanks to Zend for this article, an informative read however I believe there is a trend towards using PCRE regular expressions in PHP, in other words, regular expressions that work in Perl and at the command line in *nix