- Read and understand regular expressions
- Use literal text and metacharacters to build powerful search patterns
- Take advantage of advanced regular expression features, including lookahead and backreferences
- Perform powerful search-and-replace operations in all major professional editing tools
- Add sophisticated form and text processing to web applications
- Search for files using command-line tools like grep and egrep
- Use regular expressions in programming languages like JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Microsoft .NET, and C#, as well as in DBMSs including MySQL and Oracle
- Work with phone numbers, postal codes, social security numbers, IP addresses, URLs, email addresses, and credit card numbers