Hi all and welcome to the brand spanking new Regular Expressions forum, of which I am apparently a moderator.
As with other forums, it'll be useful to have an "Information for new users: read this first" thread. I'd be interested in suggestions for common sense things this should include.
As discussed in the thread where the vote on opening this forum was taken, not all regexp engines are the same, so obviously users should clearly state which programming language's version of regexp they're trying to use.
Then there's the usual things about descriptive titles, not using "doesn't work" etc.
Anything else?
Hm, steps to posting in a regex forum might include: 1) Googling for a method in the language you are using (because regex is slower than built in functions on a language); 2) Googling for the regex; 3) Posting here with an actual question that isn't "o hai guyzz muh regex dun work. why dun itz workin?"
A couple of resources explaining the various special characters and overall syntax of regular expressions would help ;) I had a good reference page tabulating some of the special characters at one point, but the site went down...
Actually, something as simple as a table of regex symbols and descriptions, it may be worth listing in a post here for one-click clarity :)
a list of references by language is always a handy starter, so I ripped some links from the bottom of the wikipedia regex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression) page:
It would be nice if they would actually TRY first, instead of posting "hey guys I'm looking for a regular expression to validate all numbers with a dash in the middle plzkthx."
I do like the idea of having a regexp forum, since technically they're a completely different language. In the PHP forum, sometimes it's hard to convince people that they're using 3 languages (PHP, RegExp, SQL) instead of just 1. Maybe this will help our "look, there's a whole forum for it!" argument. Though that means us PHP goons will be dumping people on this forum.
ishnid, can you ask some of the other mods to put a sticky at the top of other relevant forums directing regexp questions over here? It will probably give this forum a little more traffic. I only discovered it was here because I accidentally clicked ryon's username and saw he had posted.