The IBM developerWorks website has posted the first part of a series they've created to help PHP developers become more informed about what regular expressions are and how they can harness their power for their applications.

Pattern matching is such a common chore for software that a special shorthand '" regular expressions '" has evolved to make light work of the task. Learn how to use this shorthand in your code here in Part 1 of this "Mastering regular expressions in PHP" series.

In this first part of the series, they look at the basics - the idea behind regular expressions, some of the common operators, the PHP functions to use them and example of how to use them to match/split out strings and capture just the data you need from the given input.