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A text string pattern matching mechanism. Usually applied to individual lines of text, such as from a simple text file, where the regular expression (sometimes abbreviated as RE) pattern can be used to precisely specify which lines ought to match and which shouldn't. The more complicated REs may look very confusing to people who don't know them, as they look more like a random string of letters and other characters without any obvious meaning.
Commonly they're enclosed between slashes (/like this/), because that's how they were used in many ancient Unix tools. They can also be used for text substitution, for example with the s/ construct. A common operator specifying that a RE will follow is the tilde (~).
The Perl language makes heavy use of regular expressions, and the grep tool also searches by REs. SED and AWK are some older tools also using REs.
REs come in two forms: Basic REs and Extended REs, varying slightly in syntax and possible contructs. Perl extens the Extended REs even further and has defined the standard "Perl Compatible REs" (PCRE).
"some example string" =~ /^s*.*e+.*(?:x.* )?.*?g$/
result: 1 (because the regular expression between the // matches the string)
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World-famous DJ from the Netherlands, often abbreviated as AvB. Repeatedly voted #1 DJ in the world. Hosts the weekly radio show "A State of Trance" (ASOT) on DI.FM, which is considered to be (one of) the most important radio shows of the trance music scene.
Commonly considered to be a trance DJ, while this was true in the past, it isn't any more today. In his sets, both online and on live events, he plays all kinds of electronic music, house and progressive house, techno and techtrance, electro and electrotrance (if there is such a thing), and the modern minimal style "trance".
The biggest criticism however comes from the fact that he's pushing the worldwide trance scene towards poppish vocal trance. This is reflected by any and all of his own recent productions, which aren't trancy at all, but are just a variant of pop music with a house beat. Unfortunately most people still consider this to be trance, just due to the fact that it has AvB written on it and they think he is the "god" of trance, and thus he is largely responsible for trance music losing its identity and becoming a sub-genre of pop music.
Common nicknames for his weekly radio show include ASOC, ASOP, ASOB (A State of Crap, Pop and Bitching respectively, the latter due to the massive amount of bitching going on in the DI.FM forums during his shows, from the many trance listeners being unhappy with the show) and also different interpretations of ASOT (such as A State of Trash).
A: Wow, Armin van Buuren played in our local club yesterday, that was the best trance night ever!
B: You idiot, that was mostly vocal pop house, not trance.
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Ancient Unix tool commonly used for simple string replacements. Abbreviation of "Stream EDitor".
See also: s/
command: echo "test foo blah" | sed -e 's/foo/bar/'
output: test bar blah
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Originates from the SED and subsequently the Perl construct for a regular expression substitution: s/REGEXP/SUBST/ will replace whatever matches REGEXP with SUBST. Commonly used in chat contexts by people with a Unix background and/or wannabe hax0rs to either correct their own previous typoes, or change the meaning of somebody else's statement.
Many people also tend to drop the final slash, either because they're lazy or because they don't really know where that expression comes from.
A: trance music sucks
B: s/sucks/rules/
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