Read Regular Expressions

Regular expressions generally look something like this:

\b([A-Z1-9]{5}-){4}[A-Z1-9]{5}\b

Even experts agree that they can be difficult to read. To understand a regular expression you need to step through them carefully. Regular expressions are made up of component parts, each of which adds something to the search. One thing you can’t generally do very much, unfortunately, is format them to be more legible. Adding spaces, for example, would help readability, but would “break” your search because regex can match spaces (and other invisible “whitespace” characters) just the same as visible characters.