Is regular expression a must for doing programming?
If you are planning to write programs for any kind of dynamic webpage generation you will find regular expressions almost indispensable. If you are purely interested in numerical methods and dynamic simulation you can do without them completely. Real text-editors always give you the opportunity to use regular expressions for globally editing files. This makes finding things in files much easier, and much less prone to error than searching line by line. You might want to search a directory containing hundreds of files for all of the files with names containing a particular substring. Using a regular expression allows you to find them without searching through the whole directory listing. So the answer is maybe: It depends on what kind of programming you are doing.
