Unfortunately if you don't "understand" RegEx it won't help much. It is more for people who already have it down.
For me I am still stuck in copy/paste land. I could never get my head around the "logic" of RegEx, it just seems completely random and arbitrary.
Plus they re-use the same characters but have multiple meanings (e.g. ^ for NOT and for START).
Seriously thank you.
By the way, could someone explain this to me - do regexes match a string if a part of a string matches the regex, or if the whole string does?
For example, this regex "([+|-]* )(\d+[,|.]* )(\d+)(\.)?(e)?(\d+)" (intended to match decimal/scientific numbers - see http://regexone.com/example/0) matches "720p" on regexone, but fails to match on debuggex. So it seems like it varies depending on some configuration - is that right?
As for your question, it generally depends how they're called - eg. in Python's re module, whether you call search() or match(). You can force a regex to match the entire string by adding ^ and $.
I'm thinking of doing some tutorials geared towards teaching students in grade school how to use them. I think a visual representation would help significantly.
I find it sort of sad that several people have responded by linking to their preferred (but clearly inferior) Regex pages, which detracts from the accomplishment of this one.
The way I learned RegEx was simply spending 2 work days writing a parser with it. I think the problem is that there is a moment when RegEx suddenly makes sense, and you cannot understand how anyone can be confused by it (even when you yourself were confused just 5 minutes ago).