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Explores structural regular expressions, a composition-based approach to text matching introduced by Rob Pike in the Sam editor. The article demonstrates how chaining smaller regex patterns can describe text structure more effectively than traditional line-by-line processing. It presents structex, a Rust crate that decouples the matching engine from actions, enabling custom text processing tools. Includes practical examples building grep-like and sed-like utilities, showing how operators like x (extract), y (split), g (guard), and v (inverted match) combine with actions to manipulate text programmatically.