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Glossary

24 February, 2015 - 10:36

brittle code: Code that works when the input data is in a particular format but prone to breakage if there is some deviation from the correct format. We call this “brittle code” because it is easily broken.

greedy matching: The notion that the “+” and “*” characters in a regular expression expand outward to match the largest possible string.

grep: A command available in most Unix systems that searches through text files looking for lines that match regular expressions. The command name stands for ”Generalized Regular Expression Parser”.

regular expression: A language for expressing more complex search strings. A regular expression may contain special characters that indicate that a search only matches at the beginning or end of a line or many other similar capabilities.

wild card: A special character that matches any character. In regular expressions the wild card character is the period character.