This is a quick explanation of a simple software term for anyone who is less inclined to read a Wikipedia explanation and prefers the explain-like-Im-five approach. Programmers rely on regular expressions (regex) to identify and parse patterns in text or other data. A regular expression allows a developer to specify a pattern and then run that pattern search over a payload and identify any matches. Most of the time, hackers use regex in the form of “grep” to find files on a computer through a console. Or when scraping websites or quickly sifting through a large amount of data.