RegEx Backreferences

Backreferences are cool, but I've never needed to use them before.

I just ran into something where they were quite handy.

I had to manipulate a string like the following:

The end goal was to see if the string had either a S/S or L/S in it, along with SHIRT. If both substrings were found, remove SHIRT and move the S/S or L/S to the end of the string.

It's not hard, but a one liner kind of is. Backreferences really helped out here.

When you enclose the expression in parenthesis, you can reference that using a backreference. Pretty handy.

The string that results from the above code is:

I know my regex syntax is weak but hey, it worked.