Learning Regular Expressions
Description
Learn to use one of the most powerful text processing and manipulation tools available
Regular expression experts have long been armed with an incredibly powerful tool, one that can be used to perform all sorts of sophisticated 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. Until now.
Ben Forta's Learning Regular Expressions teaches 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.
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 to solve them.
- Read and understand regular expressions
- Use literal text and metacharacters to build powerful search patterns
- Take advantage of advanced regular expression features, including lookahead and backreferences
- Perform powerful search-and-replace operations in all major professional editing tools
- Add sophisticated form and text processing to web applications
- Search for files using command-line tools like grep and egrep
- Use regular expressions in programming languages like JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Microsoft .NET, and C#, as well as in DBMSs including MySQL and Oracle
- Work with phone numbers, postal codes, social security numbers, IP addresses, URLs, email addresses, and credit card numbers
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Ben Forta is Adobe Systems' Senior Director of Education Initiatives. He is also the author of numerous books on SQL, regular expressions, ColdFusion, Windows development, JSP, and more. His book Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes is the best-selling book on SQL of all time.
Content
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Introducing Regular Expressions 3
Understanding the Need 3
How Regular Expressions Are Used 4
RegEx Searches 4
RegEx Replaces 5
So What Exactly Is a Regular Expression? 5
Using Regular Expressions 6
Before You Get Started 7
Summary 7
Chapter 2 Matching Single Characters 9
Matching Literal Text 9
How Many Matches? 10
Handling Case Sensitivity 10
Matching Any Characters 11
Matching Special Characters 14
Summary 16
Chapter 3 Matching Sets of Characters 17
Matching One of Several Characters 17
Using Character Set Ranges 20
"Anything But" Matching 23
Summary 24
Chapter 4 Using Metacharacters 25
Escaping Revisited 25
Matching Whitespace Characters 28
Matching Specific Character Types 29
Matching Digits (and Nondigits) 29
Matching Alphanumeric Characters (and Nonalphanumeric Characters) 31
Matching Whitespace (and Nonwhitespace) 32
Specifying Hexadecimal or Octal Values 32
Using POSIX Character Classes 33
Summary 35
Chapter 5 Repeating Matches 37
How Many Matches? 37
Matching One or More Characters 38
Matching Zero or More Characters 40
Matching Zero or One Characters 42
Using Intervals 44
Exact Interval Matching 44
Range Interval Matching 45
"At Least" Interval Matching 46
Preventing Over Matching 48
Summary 49
Chapter 6 Position Matching 51
Using Boundaries 51
Using Word Boundaries 52
Defining String Boundaries 54
Using Multiline Mode 57
Summary 58
Chapter 7 Using Subexpressions 59
Understanding Subexpressions 59
Grouping with Subexpressions 60
Nesting Subexpressions 63
Summary 66
Chapter 8 Using Backreferences 67
Understanding Backreferences 67
Matching with Backreferences 70
Performing Replace Operations 73
Converting Case 75
Summary 76
Chapter 9 Looking Ahead and Behind 77
Introducing Lookaround 77
Looking Ahead 78
Looking Behind 80
Combining Lookahead and Lookbehind 82
Negating Lookaround 83
Summary 85
Chapter 10 Embedding Conditions 87
Why Embed Conditions? 87
Using Conditions 88
Backreference Conditions 88
Lookaround Conditions 90
Summary 92
Chapter 11 Regular Expression Solutions to Common Problems 93
North American Phone Numbers 93
U.S. ZIP Codes 95
Canadian Postal Codes 95
United Kingdom Postcodes 96
U.S. Social Security Numbers 97
IP Addresses 98
URLs 98
Complete URLs 99
Email Addresses 100
HTML Comments 101
JavaScript Comments 102
Credit Card Numbers 103
Summary 107
Appendix A Regular Expressions in Popular Applications and Languages 109
grep 109
Java 110
JavaScript 111
Microsoft .NET 111
Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL 112
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 112
MySQL 113
Oracle PL/SQL 114
Perl 114
PHP 115
Python 116
9780134757063 TOC 4/5/2018