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Regular expressions provide a powerful, flexible, and efficient method for processing text.

The extensive pattern-matching notation of regular expressions allows you to quickly parse large amounts of text to find specific character patterns; to extract, edit, replace, or delete text substrings; or to add the extracted strings to a collection in order to generate a report.

For many applications that deal with strings ( such as HTML processing, log file parsing, and HTTP header parsing ), regular expressions are an indispensable tool.

Designed to be compatible with existing regular expression implementations, .NET Framework regular expressions incorporate the more popular features of these implementations and include new features such as right-to-left matching and on-the-fly compilation.

The .NET Framework regular expression classes are part of the base class library and can be used with any language or tool that targets the common language runtime, including ASP.NET and Visual Studio.

Content
Regular Expressions as a Language	Details of Regular Expression Behavior
Regular Expression Examples

Regular Expression Language Elements   System.Text.RegularExpressions