Plurrrr

Thu 17 Oct 2019

Regex and grep: Data flow and building blocks

In Introducing regular expressions, I covered what they are and why they’re useful. Now let’s take a deeper look at how they’re created. Because GNU grep is one of the tools I use the most (that provides a more or less standardized implementation of regular expressions), I will use that set of expressions as the basis for this article. We will then look at sed (another tool that uses regular expressions) in a later article.

Source: Regex and grep: Data flow and building blocks, an article by David Both.

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids

Although lady’s slipper orchids continued to bloom throughout the wild woods of Europe and North America, this particular species (Cypripedium calceolus) had been declared extinct in England as of 1917. Collectors had destroyed the plant in the early 20th century, suffering from what was then known as “orchidelirium,” an incurable psychological illness marked by a need to pillage and possess, to strip the landscape bare and imprison one’s precious findings behind the four walls of a personal greenhouse.

Source: The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids, an article by Katy Kelleher.