RegEx Side

What level of school are you talking about? In high school I can see not having time to get to regular expressions. At the university level I would think most people who see them at least in a complier course when talking about parsing. Maybe in some other courses as well. I remember talking about them sort of in one other of my graduate courses but I forget which - that was a while ago.

But often they do not fit as a natural part of the curriculum. There is only so much time in most courses. What course do you see them fitting into?

They sure are useful though.

I think part of the problem is even among programmers knowledge of regular expressions isn't that strong.  I wouldn't be surprised if your teacher had only a passing knowledge of regular expression if any at all.  Support for regular expression in many langagues and appliacations has only recently gotten strong enough where their value can be appreciated.  It wasn't too long ago the regex information was very scarce.  Most of the book and website with info on regex have only appeared in the last 3 or 4 years.  And it's not a feature many languages or applications have promoted much.

Another problem is that regex doesn't have a standard.  There are multiple implementations and they vary.  Unless you were going to cover them in any depth you'd almost have to pick a language to show them in, meaning you'd have to teach the language first.  If part of your core taught a language that had good regex support that might not be and issue, but if not that one or two more classes that would have to be added. Perl would probabally be the best choice since most regex implementation are a least a subset of their implementation.

And be honest you could have a full course on regex and not cover everything in one class and this would almost certainly be an elective.  Which many wouldn't take simply because the didn't know what regular expressions were.

My college (Grinnell College) taught the theoretical underpinnings instead, automata and state machines. I think that's all that's important, every programmer is going to be expected to pick up new vocational skills for the rest of their career, no matter how many they picked up in college.

We briefly touched on regular expressions in my ASP.NET class. Though it wasn't us learning them, they were already provided by the .NET framework. i had already had heavy experience with Regular expressions, though other people in my class were alittle freaked out about the syntax. Of course though they have no idea how to do it since the regular expression was already built into the system.

One ought to be able to cover the basics of Regular Expressions in one to two days, and have the students do some parsing exercises. One good exercise is to take a sample regex and recode it without using a regular expression. Thus, the students will see the benefit of using regular expressions. It might be interesting to see timing benchmarks on using regex vs. standalone coding. I agree that anyone taking a computer science course ought to at least be exposed to regular expressions. They ought to be able to parse a simple regex such as ^https?(www.)?/w+.(com|gov|org)