Explain Regex Like I'm Five

Regular expressions are essentially matchers. They're especially useful for verifying input, and for things like online filters.

For instance, let's say I wanted to know if the user submitted a valid united states phone number in the format ###-###-####. I could easy verify with this expression:
\d\d\d-\d\d\d-\d\d\d\d

I could make this a little more readable:
\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}

(The \d means "digit" and the {#} means "repeated this many times")

Let's try another one, which will try to block the S-word and some of it's variants:
[sS5]+[hH]+[iI1]+[tT7]+

(The [...] means "any of these letters" and the + means "at least once in a row")

So this regex would match "Sh17" and "sHi7" and "SssshII1It" which is extremely useful for places like online forums which need to be kid-friendly.

There's more complex regular expressions for stuff like websites, which allows you to do something like:

comment = comment.replaceAll("(website regex)", "<a href=\"$1\">$1</a>");

That's some quick code that, given a regular expression that matches websites, will replace every instance of the website with a link to the website!

Thanks for the info