Teach Yourself Regular Expressions In 10 Minutes (2004)

Regular expressions and the regular expression language have been around for many years. Regular expression experts have long been armed with an incredibly powerful tool, one that can be used to perform all sorts of powerful text processing and manipulation in just about every language and on every platform.

That's the good news. The bad news is that for too long, regular expressions have been the exclusive property of only the most tech savvy. Most of us do not fully understand what regular expressions do and what problems they solve. And those who have braved them find regular expression syntax to be unintuitive, and even convoluted at times. That's sad, because the truth is that regular expressions are nowhere near as complex as they appear to be at first glance. All it takes is a clear understanding of the problem being solved and how to leverage regular expressions so as to solve them.

Part of the problem is the scarcity of quality content on the subject. The few books on regular expressions (and indeed, most of the Web sites boasting regular expression tutorials) tend to concentrate on the syntax, defining what { does and how + differs from *. But that is the easy part; there are not that many special characters in the regular expression language. The tricky part is understanding how they should be used so as to solve real-world problems.

The book you are holding is not intended to be the last word on everything there is to know about regular expressions. If that is what you want, you'll need a copy of Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly, ISBN 0596002890). Mr. Friedl is the acknowledged regular expressions guru, and his book is the definitive and most comprehensive on the subject. But, and no offense to Mr. Friedl, his book is not for beginners—or even for casual users who just want to get their jobs done without needing to understand the inner workings of regular expression engines. Not that it is not useful information—it is, but not when all you want to do is add validation to your HTML forms or simply perform powerful replace operations on parsed text. If you need to get up and running quickly using regular expressions, you'll find yourself torn between having too little information to be productive and having too much information to know where to begin.

And that is where this book comes in. Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes will teach you the regular expressions that you really need to know, starting with simple text matches and working up to more complex topics, including the use of backreferences, conditional evaluation, and look-ahead processing. You'll learn what you can use, and you'll learn it methodically, systematically, and simply by using clear and practical examples and solving real problems—all in lessons that will each take 10 minutes or less to complete.

So turn to Lesson 1, "Introducing Regular Expressions," and get to work. You'll be leveraging the power of regular expressions in no time at all and wondering how you ever managed without them.

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