Regular expressions
 

Learn them. They look scary but once you get used to them they're a godsend.

This one makes sure a string begins with "message" and is followed by a number:
Looks complex but it means "if the string has nothing but beginning with "message" and then followed by any number of digits and that's it".

This is helpful: http://www.english.uga.edu/humcomp/perl/regex2a.html

:)

Hey that might be useful for vbt where when it first opened all releases had to preced with [Release] - ;)

- miSt

You mean:
:p

preg_replace() is even more fun. ;) It has the power to match and extract substrings from your match string that can be used within the replace string. :D