Define regular expressions and explain their purpose
Regular expression is a computer language that refers to a sequence of characters, which define a search pattern. This pattern is the one used by the string searching algorithms for ‘find’ operations. It is vital to observe the fact that regular expressions became popular with the introduction of the UNIX operating system in 1960s and its text processing tools such as grep and ed (Edelstein, Farchi, Nir, Ratsaby & Ur, 2002). This specific computer language started when an American mathematician by the name Stephen Kleene made the description of a regular language formal. But it is the Unix text-processing utilities on computers that made this concept to become even more popular. There are now various syntaxes that are applied in writing regular expressions. They include the POSIX standard and the Perl syntax.
Notably, the main purpose for the introduction of regular expressions was the need for its use in the search engines, the search and replace dialogs in word processors as well as text editors and the text processing utilities like AWK and sed (Friedl, 2002). Regular expressions are a context-independent syntax that can represent a wide variety of character sets and character set orderings, where these character sets are interpreted according to the current locale. They are used to find particular lines in a file or to instruct a program to take certain actions when presented with a certain text string.
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