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Originally Posted by Manichean
I've already noticed a rise in threads about regexp matching for header/footer removal and such, asking just about the same questions all the time.
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I also have noticed this. GRiker gets many of them. However, I think that questions about regexps and pdfs are the winners. And I just made it worse.
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(I actually thought about writing a tutorial, but seeing as I'm just beginning to understand them, I might not be the right guy for that. I haven't fully groked how to cope with linebreaks and somesuch...)
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Writing such a tutorial would be fantastic. And your 'beginning' state might help. If you have time, then please give it a try. There is a lot of incentive here for experts to help check what you do for technical accuracy.
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That being said, I really like your mockup. Provided it understands regular expressions as well as "normal" strings (wait, that would be a regular expression in itself... nevermind), it's a gorgeous and, I think, very powerful feature.
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Isn't that a wonder feature of regexps? Any string can match itself, so it is a regexp! When I was teaching programming language compiler construction (regexps have a huge role there), students would light up when they figured that out.
Understanding that a regexp is just a string that matches other strings takes much of the magic out of it. Once we have that, all we are really worrying about is what a character is.