Regular expressions provide a concise and flexible means for "matching" (specifying and recognizing) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Regular expressions are a mighty tool for processing (e.g. searching and filtering) text data. Redbex allows you to use regular expression in different places for filtering feature, validating properties and others more.

Providing a full documentation of regular expressions would go beyond the scope of this manual, however there are numerous online resources that document how to use regular expression. For starters we want to point you to the web pages of the Micosoft Developer Network that provide extensive documentation on regular expressions.

Note that there are some different flavors of regular expressions implementations. The application server is built on top of Microsoft's .NET Framework and therefore uses their implementation of regular expressions. Microsoft .NET Framework regular expressions incorporate the most popular features of other regular expression implementations such as those in Perl and awk. Designed to be compatible with Perl 5 regular expressions, .NET Framework regular expressions include features not yet seen in other implementations, such as right-to-left matching.

Following chapters provide only an incomplete quick reference to regular expressions.