A regular expression contains a number of assertions for a certain substring of a text. "Searching for a regular expression" is therefore both more powerfull and more complex than just searching for a certain string. One requires but an exact match, the other requires the testing of a number of assertions.
Searching and replacing regular expressions is more powerful than searching and replacing plain strings. That is why people -- once they master regular expressions -- never want to go back.
There would be no ed (TheTruePath), no sed, no awk, no Perl, no Emacs (TheOneAndOnly) without regular expressions.
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