PERL Regular Expressions Troubleshooters. Probably a little faster than VB for console apps.
Regular expressions is a HUGE area of knowledge, bordering on an art.
Note that for this reason we assume all strings to be single-line strings containing no newline chars. We start with string comparisons because they're the easiest, and yet most of what's contained here is applicable in selecting and replacing text. Groups are less quirky and they more often yield the results you were looking for. Groups are regular expression characters surrounded by parentheses. Note that for single character alternatives, you can also use character classes .