Comprehensive Regular Expression Recipes: A Practical Cookbook

As its name implies, Comprehensive Regular Expression Recipes – A Practical Cookbook provides solutions for many practical problems. Because such solutions are not possible without reference to the language elements, the first part of the book introduces the regex concepts. The second part is the “cookbook” with the “recipes”. These recipes take the form of around 200 practical examples. The shown recipes solve many practical problems, and are successively refined. To simplify understanding, most recipes are explained graphically and many augmented with diagrams. More advanced, but very useful, concepts, such as bounds, Unicode categories, lookarounds and atomic groups, are illustrated with many practical recipes. Rather than providing a large number of variations for a limited number of tasks, the recipes in the book cover a wide range of practical tasks, with alternative solutions where appropriate. Practical solutions are provided for almost all regex syntax elements, even those often neglected. The programming examples for C#, Perl, Python and JavaScript (complete programs for the latter) show how regexes can be extended with further facilities, such as checksum validation, when regex alone does not suffice.