How important is knowing Regexs?

Question

My personal experience is that regexs solve problems that can\'t be efficiently solved any other way, and are so frequently required in a world where strings are as important as

Answer 1

I think knowing a regex is a quite important skill. While the usage of regex in a programming environment/language is question of maintainable code, I find the knowledge of regex to be useful with some commands (say egrep), editors (vim, emacs etc.). Using a regex to do a find and replace in vim is very handy when you have a text file and you want to do some formatting once in a while.