Regular Expressions Cookbook

Take the guesswork out of using regular expressions. With more than 140 practical recipes, this cookbook provides everything you need to solve a wide range of real-world problems. Novices will learn basic skills and tools, and programmers and experienced users will find a wealth of detail. Each recipe provides samples you can use right away.

This revised edition covers the regular expression flavors used by C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET. You’ll learn powerful new tricks, avoid flavor-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of practical solutions.

• Learn regular expressions basics through a detailed tutorial
• Use code listings to implement regular expressions with your language of choice
• Understand how regular expressions differ from language to language
• Handle common user input with recipes for validation and formatting
• Find and manipulate words, special characters, and lines of text
• Detect integers, floating-point numbers, and other numerical formats
• Parse source code and process log files
• Use regular expressions in URLs, paths, and IP addresses
• Manipulate HTML, XML, and data exchange formats
• Discover little-known regular expression tricks and techniques

Jan Goyvaerts runs Just Great Software, where he designs and develops some of the most popular regular expression software. His products include RegexBuddy, the world's only regular expression editor that emulates the peculiarities of 15 regular expression flavors, and PowerGREP, the most feature-rich grep tool for Microsoft Windows.

Steve Levithan works at Facebook as a JavaScript engineer. He has enjoyed programming for nearly 15 years, working in Tokyo, Washington D.C., Baghdad, and Silicon Valley. Steven is a leading JavaScript regular expression expert, and has created a variety of open source regular expression tools including RegexPal and the XRegExp library.