Beginning Regular Expressions - Softcover

Watt, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0764574892 ISBN 13: 9780764574894

Publisher: John Wiley &Sons, 2005

Synopsis

This book introduces the various parts of the construction of a regular expression pattern, explains what they mean, and walks you through working examples showing how they work and why they do what they do. By working through the examples, you will build your understanding of how to make regular expressions do what you want them to do and avoid creating regular expressions that don’t meet your intentions.
Beginning chapters introduce regular expressions and show you a method you can use to break down a text manipulation problem into component parts so that you can make an intelligent choice about constructing a regular expression pattern that matches what you want it to match and avoids matching unwanted text.
To solve more complex problems, you should set out a problem definition and progressively refine it to express it in English in a way that corresponds to a regular expression pattern that does what you want it to do.
The second part of the book devotes a chapter to each of several technologies available on the Windows platform. You are shown how to use each tool or language with regular expressions (for example, how to do a lookahead in Perl or create a named variable in C#).
Regular expressions can be useful in applications such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Access. A chapter is devoted to each.
In addition, tools such as the little-known Windows findstr utility and the commercial PowerGrep tool each have a chapter showing how they can be used to solve text manipulation tasks that span multiple files.
The use of regular expressions in the MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases are also demonstrated.
Several programming languages have a chapter describing the metacharacters available for use in those languages together with demonstrations of how the objects or classes of that language can be used with regular expressions. The languages covered are VBScript, Javascript, Visual Basic .NET, C#, PHP, Java, and Perl.
XML is used increasingly to store textual data. The W3C XML Schema definition language can use regular expressions to automatically validate data in an XML document. W3C XML Schema has a chapter demonstrating how regular expressions can be used with the xs:pattern element.
Chapters 1 through 10 describe the component parts of regular expression patterns and show you what they do and how they can be used with a variety of text manipulation tools and languages. You should work through these chapters in order and build up your understanding of regular expressions.
The book then devotes a chapter to each of several text manipulation tools and programming languages. These chapters assume knowledge from Chapters 1 through 10, but you can dip into the tool-specific and language-specific chapters in any order you want.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Regular expressions help users and developers to find and manipulate text more effectively and efficiently. In addition, regular expressions are supported by many scripting languages, programming languages, and databases. This example-rich tutorial helps debunk the traditional reputation of regular expressions as being cryptic. It explains the various parts of a regular expression pattern, what those parts mean, how to use them, and common pitfalls to avoid when writing regular expressions.

With chapters on using regular expressions with popular Windows platform software including databases, cross platform scripting languages, and programming languages, you'll learn to make effective use of the power provided by regular expressions once you fully comprehend their strengths and potential.

What you will learn from this book

• Fundamental concepts of regular expressions and how to write them
• How to break down a text manipulation problem into component parts so you can then logically construct a regular expression pattern
• How to use regular expressions in several scripting and programming languages and software packages
• The variations that exist among regular expression dialects
• Reusable, real-world working code that can be used to solve everyday regular expression problems

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who need to manipulate text but are new to regular expressions. Some basic programming or scripting experience is useful but not required.

About the Author

Andrew Watt is an independent consultant and experienced author with an interest and expertise in XML and Web technologies. He has written and coauthored more than 10 books on Web development and XML, including XPath Essentials and XML Schema Essentials. He has been programming since 1984, moving to Web development technologies in 1994. He’s a well-known voice in several influential online technical communities and is a frequent contributor to many Web development specifications.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley &Sons
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0764574892
• ISBN 13: 9780764574894
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 772