Mastering Regular Expressions: Powerful Techniques for Perl and Other Tools (Nutshell Handbooks)

Regular expressions are a powerful tool for manipulating text and data. This book, with its unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage, will help you discover a whole new world of mastery over your computer and its data. Regular expressions are not a tool in and of themselves, but are included as part of a larger utility. The classic example is grep. Regular expressions can be found everywhere, such as in scripting languages (including Perl, Tcl, awk, and Python); editors (including Emacs, vi, and Nisus Writer); programming environments (including Delphi and Visual C++); and specialized tools (including lex, Expect, and sed). In this eye-opening book, author Jeffrey Friedl leads you through the steps of crafting a regular expression that gets the job done. He examines a variety of tools and uses them in an extensive array of examples, with a major focus on Perl.

Regular expressions are a central element of UNIX utilities like egrep and programming languages such as Perl. But whether you're a UNIX user or not, you can benefit from a better understanding of regular expressions since they work with applications ranging from validating data-entry fields to manipulating information in multimegabyte text files. Mastering Regular Expressions quickly covers the basics of regular-expression syntax, then delves into the mechanics of expression-processing, common pitfalls, performance issues, and implementation-specific differences. Written in an engaging style and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions offers a wealth information that you can put to immediate use.