Pete asked: 
"Does anyone have any references to using regular expressions, preferable
with lots of examples?"

If you are using a Mac i suggest getting yourself a copy of BBedit or its free 
sibling "TextWrangler".
I have never been much for using terminal commands and the like as I always 
preferred the Mac GUI so when it came to text manipulation I sought out easier 
tools. Nisus was my first taste of using regex with its token substitutions but 
when it when in to abeyance for a while I turned to BBedit.
It allows the use of grep ( a command line regex tool) in its find and replace 
dialog and also does find and replace across multiple files. It's manual 
provides a good introduction to what you can do with regex, it is blindingly 
fast and a really easily way to try out different expressions.
I found it invaluable when I wrote a web-scrapping app to provide a back end to 
my DVD collection many years ago. I still have times when I need to do a lot of 
text manipulation and will inevitably turn to BBedit's regex prowess to do the 
heavy lifting.
As for references, there are lots on the web and O'Reilly have a couple of good 
books.
But BBEDIT (or TextWrangler) will provide an easily accessible interface into 
using regex and trying out different things.

James



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