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In computing, a regular expression, also referred to as regex or regexp, provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification. Regular expressions are used by many text editors, utilities, and programming languages to search and manipulate text based on patterns. Some of these languages, including Perl, Ruby, Awk, and Tcl, have fully integrated regular expressions into the syntax of the core language itself. Others like C, C++, .NET, Java, and Python instead provide access to regular expressions only through libraries. Utilities provided by Unix distributions—including the editor ed and the filter grep—were the first to popularize the concept of regular expressions.