Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1. to Regular Expressions Here's the scenario: you're given the job of checking the pages on a web server for doubled words (such as "this this"), a common problem with documents subject to heavy editing. Your job is to create a...

Chapter 2. Extended Introductory Examples Remember the doubled-word problem from the first chapter? I said that a full solution could be written in just a few lines in a language like Perl. Such a solution might look like: $/...

Chapter 3. Overview of Regular Expression Features and Flavors Now that you have a feel for regular expressions and a few diverse tools that use them, you might think we're ready to dive into using them wherever they're found. But even a...

Chapter 4. The Mechanics of Expression Processing The previous chapter started with an analogy between cars and regular expressions. The bulk of the chapter discussed features, regex flavors, and other "glossy brochure" issues of regula...

Chapter 5. Practical Regex Techniques Now that we've covered the basic mechanics of writing regular expressions, I'd like to put that understanding to work in handling situations more complex than those in earlier chapters. Every regex st...

Chapter 6. Crafting an Efficient Expression Section 6.1. Section 6.2. A Sobering Example Section 6.3. A Global View of Backtracking Section 6.4....

Chapter 7. Perl Perl has been featured prominently in this book, and with good reason. It is popular, extremely rich with regular expressions, freely and readily obtainable, easily approachable by the beginner, and available for a r...

Chapter 8. Java Java has had a native regex package, java.util.regex, since the early-2002 release of Java 1.4.0. It provides powerful and innovative functionality with an uncluttered (if somewhat simplistic) API. It has fairly good U...

Chapter 9. .NET Microsoft's .NET Framework, usable with Visual Basic, C#, and C++ (among other languages), offers a shared regular-expression library that unifies regex semantics among the languages. It's a full-featured, powerful...

Chapter 10. PHP PHP's popularity exploded during the early phases of the late-90s web boom and remains wildly popular today. One reason for this popularity is that even nonengineers can start using its basic features with very little pr...