Regular expressions

[filburt1]

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:

/^message[0-9]*$/

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