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Product Description
Product Description
This cookbook provides more than 100 recipes to help you crunch data and manipulate text with regular expressions. Every programmer can find uses for regular expressions, but their power doesn't come worry-free. Even seasoned users often suffer from poor performance, false positives, false negatives, or perplexing bugs. Regular Expressions Cookbook offers step-by-step instructions for some of the most common tasks involving this tool, with recipes for C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET.
With this book, you will:
- Understand the basics of regular expressions through a concise tutorial
- Use regular expressions effectively in several programming and scripting languages
- Learn how to validate and format input
- Manage words, lines, special characters, and numerical values
- Find solutions for using regular expressions in URLs, paths, markup, and data exchange
- Learn the nuances of more advanced regex features
- Understand how regular expressions' APIs, syntax, and behavior differ from language to language
- Write better regular expressions for custom needs
Whether you're a novice or an experienced user, Regular Expressions Cookbook will help deepen your knowledge of this unique and irreplaceable tool. You'll learn powerful new tricks, avoid language-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of proven solutions to difficult, real-world problems.
About the Author
Jan Goyvaerts runs Just Great Software, where he designs and develops some of the most popular regular expression software. His products include RegexBuddy, the world's only regular expression editor that emulates the peculiarities of 15 regular expression flavors, and PowerGREP, the most feature-rich grep tool for Microsoft Windows.
Steven Levithan is a leading JavaScript regular expression expert and runs a popular regular expression centric blog at http://blog.stevenlevithan.com. Expanding his knowledge of the regular expression flavor and library landscape has been one of his hobbies for the last several years.
Inside This Book
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews)
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
At last a Use Case based RegEx Book, Jun 7 2009
By Bob Reselman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Regular Expressions Cookbook (Paperback)
As much as I hate to admit it, regular expressions are hard for me. My need to use them is situation specific and I never really took the time to master them conceptually. So, when it comes time create one, I have to grope around to figure out how to meet the need at hand.
This book is really made for a person like me. The structure is problem-solution based. And, every problem is numbered in outline format. Thus, referencing back is an easy affair.
Want to know how to find bold text in an HTML file? This book will tell you how.
Want to learn how to split a sting using a regular expression? This book tells you how.
The book discusses solutions generally and in language specifics. It supports C#, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, VB.NET.... the entire cast of the usual characters. (No pun intended.)
The writing is clear. You can take things in a bit at a time. And, that some of the problems use those 'hard to get concepts', the topical discussions actually teach you the difficult concepts in a manner that is pretty easy to understand. Sometimes you might have to go over a section of few times to get full understanding. But the review is not a chore.
This is a good, useful book. It's helping me to become a better engineer. And believe me, I need all the help that I can get! :)
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!, Jun 11 2009
By John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Regular Expressions Cookbook (Paperback)
Do you regularly work with text on a computer? If you do, then this book is for you! Authors Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that shows you how you can use regular expressions in situations where people with limited regular expressions experience would normally say it can't be done.
Goyvaerts and Levithan, begin by explaining the role of regular expressions and introduce a number of tools that will make it easier to learn, create, and debug them. Next, the authors cover each element and feature of regular expressions, along with important guidelines for effective use. Then, they specify coding techniques and include code listings for using regular expressions in each of the programming languages covered by this book. They continue by focusing on recipes for handling typical user input, such as dates, phone numbers, and postal codes in various countries. Next, the authors explore common text processing tasks, such as checking for lines that contain or fail to contain certain words. Then, they show you how to detect integers, floating-point numbers, and several other formats for this kind of input. The authors continue by showing you how to take apart and manipulate the strings commonly used on the Internet and Windows systems to find things. Finally, the authors cover the manipulation of HTML, XML, comma-separated values (CSV), and INI-style configuration files.
This most excellent book shows you everything you need to know about regular expressions, and then some, regardless of whether you are a programmer. More importantly, if you read this book cover to cover, you'll become a world class chef of regular expressions.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Goes further and deeper than many tutorials on regular expressions, Jun 21 2009
By Techie Evan - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Regular Expressions Cookbook (Paperback)
This excellent book goes further and deeper than many tutorials on regular expressions. You might be surprised with some of the things you'll learn from reading it.
Unlike many cookbooks, this one doesn't dive into the recipes right away. I thought this was a good call because regular expressions are a specialized topic, and most developers don't work with regular expressions on a daily basis so they probably have to be reminded of the building block concepts and syntax, and get prepared for a discussion of more advanced features. Chapter One provides a list of recommended tools for working with regular expressions. Chapter 2 is a concise but very thorough discussion of building block and more advanced regular expression concepts (e.g., possessive quantifier or atomic grouping, named capturing groups, lookahead and lookbehind, etc.), including a discussion of differences in engine implementations and feature support. Chapter 3 is a hundred-plus page tutorial on how to work with regular expressions using different programming and scripting languages, including potential gotchas and workarounds. Chapters Four through Eight contain the recipes for solving real-world problems, with tips on how to improve an initial solution's readability (e.g., use named capturing groups when possible, etc.) and/or efficiency.
I was initially skeptical about the authors' ambitious goal of covering so many regular expression flavors, thinking the discussions of differences in engine supported features might prove distracting. The book is written and organized so well, however, my fear did not materialize. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that: of the covered flavors, Microsoft's DotNet regex engine supports some of the most advanced features.
There's not much to dislike about this book but if I were asked to suggest one or two things that might be of value-add to readers, I would suggest making available for download files containing appropriate subject strings for testing the book's various recipes as a convenience to readers who learn best by doing and want to follow along as they read the recipes, and for the book to include, for easy reference, a feature-support comparison matrix of the covered flavors, much like the comparison table available in the regular-expressions.info website.
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