Most Web builders have used JavaScript to extract information from a string. In fact, you do it every time you write a browser detection script.
Regular expressions make client-side text manipulation much easier than it used to be.
And once you see what you can do with them in JavaScript, you won't want to look back. If you have no previous experience with regular expressions, I cover the basics later in this column. Here's a simple example of using regular expressions in JavaScript. This object has several interesting and useful properties and methods that let you use the pattern to work with strings. There are actually two ways to construct regular expressions in JavaScript.