[georgia_peach]

It is surprising / not surprising to see the lengths people go to not learn regex. There's not much to it. If you're just starting out, find a good reference, and memorize it. Mastery is another thing entirely, but it always is.

In *nix land, a decent reference is built-in: `man awk` and jump to the "Regular Expressions" section.

[jwilk]

There are many awk implementations, so whether that reference is decent or not may vary. It looks like on BSDs, there's so such section at all.

[georgia_peach]

Tested on Linux, OpenBSD, & Mac:

POSIX: man 7 re_format

PCRE: man pcrepattern

PCRE2: man pcre2pattern

PCRE may be a "works on my machine" thing, but POSIX should be there.