On 3/25/2008 4:25 PM, Dirk.R.Gently@gmail.com wrote:
> On Mar 25, 3:33 pm, Maxwell Lol <nos...@com.invalid> wrote:
>
>>"Dirk.R.Gen...@gmail.com" <Dirk.R.Gen...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>Now I understand special characters need to be preceded with a / but
>>
>>You mean \ - not /
>
>
> lol thanks for the guys. I must be dyslexic

Just be aware that different tools support different RE specifications and you
can't always use REs instead of strings. For example:

sed uses Basic REs or Extended REs depending on tool version and options given.
grep uses Basic REs, Extended REs, or Perl REs depending on tool version and
options given.
awk uses Extended REs but only in conditions and some functions and some ERE
functionality must be explicitly enabled with options for backward compatibility.
perl, presumably, uses Perl REs....
etc......

So when asking any question about REs, it's usually important to say what type
of RE you're interested in and/or which tool you're using.

For a general RE reference, I like
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/...99/xbd/re.html.

Ed.