Regular Expressions

PowerShell is very similar to .NET, so it is no surprise that it is very popular with .NET developers. It is a language for writing scripts, so you might encounter some unexpected situations. I had this experience when I tried to parse some HTML with PowerShell: I could not get the replacement with regular expression groups to work! It turned out that my .NET knowledge was working against me…

As a developer, I love to solve common string problems with regular expression. Sure, they are sometimes hard to read, but you can do so much with such a small expression! It is nice that many languages have support for them, but sometimes it feels like every language creates its own dialect. Let’s look at the difference between regular expression groups in .NET and JavaScript.