Mastering Regular Expressions

Paperback, 515 pages

English language

Published Aug. 8, 2006 by O'Reilly Media, Inc..

ISBN:: 978-0-596-52812-6

(3 reviews)

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 regular expressions, 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 …

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 regular expressions, 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 immediate use. - Publisher.

1 edition

Sergey Machulskis reviewed Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl

Review of 'Mastering Regular Expressions' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

The book cleared a lot of fog in my understanding of regular expressions. I knew they're based on finite automata theory (from this excellent book, which I highly recommend). I thought DFAs and NFAs are equivalent in power and different regular expression engines just implement their own translations of regexes to those NFA or DFA forms. It turned out, modern regular expressions much, much more powerful than NFAs. This book explains why. As a side effect, it helps to understand how to craft correct and efficient regular expression. Even for the POSIX NFA engine.

I wasn't sure about the interaction of regular expressions with language around them. This includes escaping rules, regex engine types and so on. There's a lot of examples in different languages so you can really feel the difference between regex flavors.

I didn't read the whole book, the second half is about guts of languages …

The book cleared a lot of fog in my understanding of regular expressions. I knew they're based on finite automata theory (from this excellent book, which I highly recommend). I thought DFAs and NFAs are equivalent in power and different regular expression engines just implement their own translations of regexes to those NFA or DFA forms. It turned out, modern regular expressions much, much more powerful than NFAs. This book explains why. As a side effect, it helps to understand how to craft correct and efficient regular expression. Even for the POSIX NFA engine.

I wasn't sure about the interaction of regular expressions with language around them. This includes escaping rules, regex engine types and so on. There's a lot of examples in different languages so you can really feel the difference between regex flavors.

I didn't read the whole book, the second half is about guts of languages I never use nor plan to use (Perl, PHP, .Net).

-1 star for silly examples. Who's gonna parse HTML or even URLs using regular expressions? It's a minefield.

HokieGeek

rated it

July 5, 2016

Stalwart

rated it

April 14, 2015