Beginning Regular Expressions

Supported by all major databases, scripting languages, and programming languages, regular expressions are powerful "wild-card" text-processing tools used by programmers to find, validate, modify, or edit information Covering a wide range of languages and databases-including JavaScript, ASP.

Take the guesswork out of using regular expressions. With more than 140 practical recipes, this cookbook provides everything you need to solve a wide range of real-world problems. Novices will learn basic skills and tools, and programmers and experienced users will find a wealth of detail. Each recipe provides samples you can use right away. This revised edition covers the regular expression flavors used by C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET. You’ll learn powerful new tricks, avoid flavor-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of practical solutions. Learn regular expressions basics through a detailed tutorial Use code listings to implement regular expressions with your language of choice Understand how regular expressions differ from language to language Handle common user input with recipes for validation and formatting Find and manipulate words, special characters, and lines of text Detect integers, floating-point numbers, and other numerical formats Parse source code and process log files Use regular expressions in URLs, paths, and IP addresses Manipulate HTML, XML, and data exchange formats Discover little-known regular expression tricks and techniques

Introduces regular expressions and how they are used, discussing topics including metacharacters, nomenclature, matching and modifying text, expression processing, benchmarking, optimizations, and loops.

If you’re a programmer new to regular expressions, this easy-to-follow guide is a great place to start. You’ll learn the fundamentals step-by-step with the help of numerous examples, discovering first-hand how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns. Regular expressions are an essential part of a programmer’s toolkit, available in various Unix utlilities as well as programming languages such as Perl, Java, JavaScript, and C#. When you’ve finished this book, you’ll be familiar with the most commonly used syntax in regular expressions, and you’ll understand how using them will save you considerable time. Discover what regular expressions are and how they work Learn many of the differences between regular expressions used with command-line tools and in various programming languages Apply simple methods for finding patterns in text, including digits, letters, Unicode characters, and string literals Learn how to use zero-width assertions and lookarounds Work with groups, backreferences, character classes, and quantifiers Use regular expressions to mark up plain text with HTML5

Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data. They are now standard features in a wide range of languages and popular tools, including Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, and MySQL. If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regularexpressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener. As this book shows, a command of regular expressions is an invaluable skill. Regular expressions allow you to code complex and subtle text processing that you never imagined could be automated. Regular expressions can save you time and aggravation. They can be used to craft elegant solutions to a wide range of problems. Once you've mastered regular expressions, they'll become an invaluable part of your toolkit. You will wonder how you ever got by without them. Yet despite their wide availability, flexibility, and unparalleled power, regular expressions are frequently underutilized. Yet what is power in the hands of an expert can be fraught with peril for the unwary. Mastering Regular Expressions will help you navigate the minefield to becoming an expert and help you optimize your use of regular expressions. Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, now includes a full chapter devoted to PHP and its powerful and expressive suite of regular expression functions, in addition to enhanced PHP coverage in the central "core" chapters. Furthermore, this edition has been updated throughout to reflect advances in other languages, including expanded in-depth coverage of Sun's java.util.regex package, which has emerged as the standard Java regex implementation.Topics include: A comparison of features among different versions of many languages and tools How the regular expression engine works Optimization (major savings available here!) Matching just what you want, but not what you don't want Sections and chapters on individual languages Written in the lucid, entertaining tone that makes a complex, dry topic become crystal-clear to programmers, and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition offers a wealth information that you can put to immediateuse. Reviews of this new edition and the second edition: "There isn't a better (or more useful) book available on regular expressions." --Zak Greant, Managing Director, eZ Systems "A real tour-de-force of a book which not only covers the mechanics of regexes in extraordinary detail but also talks about efficiency and the use of regexes in Perl, Java, and .NET...If you use regular expressions as part of your professional work (even if you already have a good book on whatever language you're programming in) I would strongly recommend this book to you." --Dr. Chris Brown, Linux Format "The author does an outstanding job leading the reader from regexnovice to master. The book is extremely easy to read and chock full ofuseful and relevant examples...Regular expressions are valuable toolsthat every developer should have in their toolbox. Mastering RegularExpressions is the definitive guide to the subject, and an outstandingresource that belongs on every programmer's bookshelf. Ten out of TenHorseshoes." --Jason Menard, Java Ranch

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes. This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. This book contains 33 chapters contributed by Brian Kernighan, KarlFogel, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Michael Feathers,Alberto Savoia, Charles Petzold, Douglas Crockford, Henry S. Warren,Jr., Ashish Gulhati, Lincoln Stein, Jim Kent, Jack Dongarra and PiotrLuszczek, Adam Kolawa, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Diomidis Spinellis, AndrewKuchling, Travis E. Oliphant, Ronald Mak, Rogerio Atem de Carvalho andRafael Monnerat, Bryan Cantrill, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, SimonPeyton Jones, Kent Dybvig, William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, AndrewPatzer, Andreas Zeller, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Arun Mehta, TV Raman,Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, and Brian Hayes. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.

This book introduces the various parts of the construction of a regular expression pattern, explains what they mean, and walks you through working examples showing how they work and why they do what they do. By working through the examples, you will build your understanding of how to make regular expressions do what you want them to do and avoid creating regular expressions that don’t meet your intentions. Beginning chapters introduce regular expressions and show you a method you can use to break down a text manipulation problem into component parts so that you can make an intelligent choice about constructing a regular expression pattern that matches what you want it to match and avoids matching unwanted text. To solve more complex problems, you should set out a problem definition and progressively refine it to express it in English in a way that corresponds to a regular expression pattern that does what you want it to do. The second part of the book devotes a chapter to each of several technologies available on the Windows platform. You are shown how to use each tool or language with regular expressions (for example, how to do a lookahead in Perl or create a named variable in C#). Regular expressions can be useful in applications such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Access. A chapter is devoted to each. In addition, tools such as the little-known Windows findstr utility and the commercial PowerGrep tool each have a chapter showing how they can be used to solve text manipulation tasks that span multiple files. The use of regular expressions in the MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases are also demonstrated. Several programming languages have a chapter describing the metacharacters available for use in those languages together with demonstrations of how the objects or classes of that language can be used with regular expressions. The languages covered are VBScript, Javascript, Visual Basic .NET, C#, PHP, Java, and Perl. XML is used increasingly to store textual data. The W3C XML Schema definition language can use regular expressions to automatically validate data in an XML document. W3C XML Schema has a chapter demonstrating how regular expressions can be used with the xs:pattern element. Chapters 1 through 10 describe the component parts of regular expression patterns and show you what they do and how they can be used with a variety of text manipulation tools and languages. You should work through these chapters in order and build up your understanding of regular expressions. The book then devotes a chapter to each of several text manipulation tools and programming languages. These chapters assume knowledge from Chapters 1 through 10, but you can dip into the tool-specific and language-specific chapters in any order you want.

This is a comprehensive guide to PHP, a simple yet powerful language for creating dynamic web content. It is a detailed reference to the language and its applications, including such topics as form processing, sessions, databases, XML, and graphics and Covers PHP 4, the latest version.